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 A BOOK OF STRANGE SINS
 
 A BOOK OF STRANGE SINS 
 
 COULSON KERNAHAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF " A DEAD MAN'S DIARY " 
 
 " Whattoevtr a man tovteth, that tkall ht alto reap." GALATIAMS vi., 7. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 WARD, LOCK & BOWDEN, LIMITED 
 
 WARWICK HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE, E. C. 
 
 NEW YORK, MELBOURNE AND SYDNEY 
 1893 
 
 [All rights reserved]
 
 A TRUE POET 
 
 AND 
 
 A FRIEND OF FRIENDS 
 
 861107
 
 PREFACE
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 WHEN the Fourth Edition of "A Dead Man's 
 Diary" was in the press, my friend, 'Mr. James 
 Bowden (of Ward, Lock & Bowden, Limited, the pub- 
 lishers), whose generous and honourable treatment in 
 regard to the first book of a young and inexperienced 
 author I shall not soon forget, was of opinion that, as 
 the First, Second and Third Editions were published 
 anonymously, it would be well if the Fourth appeared 
 with a preface by myself. I did not however feel that 
 I had anything to say which was of sufficient import- 
 ance to warrant me in thus specially coming forward to 
 say it, but in publishing my second book I may perhaps 
 be permitted to avail myself of the opportunity to ex- 
 press my cordial thanks to the readers and the reviewers 
 who found something in my first book to praise, and 
 the hope that I have profited by their strictures to 
 those who found much in it to condemn, as well as to 
 make an explanation in regard to the title and aim of 
 the present volume.
 
 u PREFACE. 
 
 And first I would say that this is not a collection 
 of short stories. It is true that before the publication 
 of my first book, I assisted in bringing about the pre- 
 mature dissolution of several promising magazines by 
 contributing short stories to their pages; and it is true 
 too that after the appearance of that volume, a certain 
 publisher was unwise enough to offer me a not unde- 
 sirable sum of money if I would allow him to collect 
 the best of them in a volume. 
 
 That I refused my consent has been a constant 
 source of consolation to me when I find myself in dan- 
 ger of losing my literary self respect. We suffer now-a- 
 days from a plethora, rather than from a scarcity of 
 book production, and unless a writer have something to 
 say, which is different from, or better said than what 
 has been said before, he will earn a more lasting title 
 to our regard by selling sound sugar at honest prices 
 than by publishing a book. 
 
 It is likely enough that my own words will be held 
 by some to sentence me to the Siberia of the scales 
 and the sugar-scoop; but whether it be so or not I can 
 at least claim to have practised what I preach, for it is 
 now more than three years since my "Dead Man's 
 Diary" was published, during which, with the exception 
 of having had the pleasure and the privilege of acting
 
 PREFACE, iii 
 
 as assistant editor to Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson in 
 the preparation of the new edition of his "Lyra Ele- 
 gantiarum," and the contribution of a few critical arti- 
 cles to the Fortnightly Review, my name has not been 
 before the reading public in any prominent way. 
 
 With the exception of "The Lonely God," and 
 "The Garden of God," which by the advice of my 
 ever-honoured and ever-loved friend, and more than 
 friend, the late G. T. Bettany, I wrote to relieve the 
 sombre tone which pervades the rest of the volume, all 
 the papers in this book have, or are meant to have 
 unity and connection, inasmuch as each is a study of 
 some form of crime or sin. Drink, Lust, Murder, Soul- 
 Murder, Pride, Suicide, and last not least, the sordid, 
 respectable, self-seeking and self-righteousness which are 
 often more deadening to the spiritual nature than actual 
 vice or sin, are dealt with either separately or in con- 
 nection with some other form of human wrongdoing. 
 
 That I shall be accused of straining after what is 
 sensational and morbid I fully foresee, and upon this 
 subject I wish to say an anticipatory word. 
 
 I deny that in these studies I have dwelt unduly 
 upon the details of any crime or sin. Such details are 
 to my thinking, what the hands of a watch or clock 
 are to its works, and are of importance only as in-
 
 iv PREFACE. 
 
 dications of the state of the restless, unseen, but infinitely 
 interesting influences at work within ; and indeed crime 
 or sin, in itself and apart from the conditions which 
 bring it about, runs much to one pattern, and is scarcely 
 a more interesting subject of study than are the hands 
 of the watch or clock to which I have likened it. It is 
 not the sordid particulars of crime and sin which I have 
 tried to lay bare in these pages, but the influence of 
 these crimes and sins upon the men and women who 
 commit them. It is the secrets of souls and not of sins 
 into which I have attempted to look, and whatever there is 
 that is sensational or morbid in this volume, is, as far as I 
 am concerned, merely a matter of detail and background. 
 
 COULSON KERNAHAN. 
 " THRUMS," 
 
 SOUTHEND-ON-SEA, 
 
 August 24th, 1893.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE LONELY GOD 
 A STRANGE SIN 
 
 A SUICIDE . 
 
 THE GARDEN OF GOD 
 THE APPLES OF SIN 
 A LITERARY GENT . 
 A LOST SOUL
 
 THE LONELY GOD.
 
 THE LONELY GOD. 
 
 A MAN lay on his bed at midnight, and 
 dreamt that he stood alone by the sea, 
 and that his hour of death was nigh. 
 
 He looked out upon the black and intermin- 
 able waste of waters, and up to the changeless 
 stars in the unpitying sky, as the mariner gazes 
 upon a new and unknown land which he is ap- 
 proaching ; and he told himself that soon he 
 should know the secrets of sea, and sky. 
 
 And as he stood, there blew from the gates 
 of night and across the sea, a wind that made 
 him shiver less with physical cold than with a 
 sense of soul desolation and loneliness ; a wind 
 which chilled the heart of him even more than 
 the body. 
 
 And as he looked again upon the windy and 
 cloud-swept sky, and to the cold and steely glit- 
 ter of the silent stars, his lonely spirit, losing it- 
 self in the infinite abyss, turned sick and giddy
 
 4 THE LONELY GOD. 
 
 at the thought of dying, and reeled shuddering 
 to earth again. 
 
 And the man thought of the woman he loved, 
 the wife of his heart and mother of his children, 
 and that if he and she might but die together 
 if he might but set out with her hand in his, he 
 should no longer fear to make death's journey ; 
 and, even as he so thought, he awoke with 
 pounding heart and panting breath ; awoke to 
 shudder at the darkness and the loneliness, and 
 with a nameless fear lying at the centre of life, 
 like the lurking shadow of an unknown, unseen 
 foe. 
 
 And as he lay he heard the low breathing ot 
 his sleeping wife, and with a sigh of glad relief, 
 and all sense of lonesomeness gone, the man 
 closed his eyes and fell asleep. 
 
 And again he dreamed a dream in which he 
 thought that he stood in the presence of God. 
 
 Whether he had been borne to the infinite 
 regions which stretch on and away, and yet 
 away, and yet again away beyond the limits of
 
 THE LONELY GOD. 5 
 
 our universe ; or whether he were still on the 
 earth ; or had soared to a distant star, or to the 
 vast and void sky spaces that lie between the 
 worlds ; or had crept into the narrow chamber 
 of the human soul, the man knew not, but he 
 was aware in some wonderful way of all that 
 was taking place on all God's myriad and mar- 
 vellous worlds. 
 
 He saw circling planets sweep faster and 
 faster on their ever-narrowing orbit, until at last 
 they fell and flew, like moths to a candle, to feed 
 the flaming furnace of the sun ; and he looked 
 upon his own home, and saw the billowy rise 
 and fall of his sleeping wife's bosom, and heard 
 the cry of the child which lay in a cot by her 
 side. 
 
 He gazed upon burnt-out worlds, moons that 
 had once been astir with life, and heard their 
 cooling and cinderous surfaces crack into chasm 
 and cave ; and he looked into the bowels of the 
 earth, and saw strange creatures breeding and 
 sporting amid the central fires.
 
 6 THE LONELY GOD. 
 
 He watched comets, those vagabonds of the 
 heavens, wandering gipsy-like between the 
 worlds, or weaving out-lying system to out-lying 
 system, like nebulous shuttlecocks of the skies ; 
 and he saw into the secret workings of human 
 souls. 
 
 i He looked upon the planet Jupiter, that lab- 
 oratory of God, and beheld, moving athwart the 
 thin atmosphere, strange shapes, uncanny as a 
 half-formed, prematurely-born babe, that seemed 
 neither spirit nor flesh, but which he knew were 
 the soul-embryos of creatures which, developing 
 by progressive stages and from age to age, 
 should, in the aeons to be, become beings infi- 
 nitely greater than man, and scarcely less glori- 
 ous than God ; and he peered beneath the 
 earth's surface, and watched the anxious run- 
 ning to and fro of innumerable ants. 
 
 Then raising his head the man looked into 
 the eyes of God, and saw eternity lying therein. 
 
 And at that sight the man fell back with a cry 
 like that of one smitten by the lightning, and
 
 THE LONELY GOD. 7 
 
 with the very soul of him sick and swooning 
 with fear. 
 
 But in a voice of infinite tenderness, God 
 spake to the man, bidding him be of good cheer. 
 
 And God said : " Art thou he who feared 
 death because of its loneliness ? " 
 
 And the man said : " I am he." 
 
 And to him the Almighty spake again : 
 " Thou diest alone, but I live alone ; and as is 
 the sound which thou hearest in the hollow con- 
 volutions of a shell, to the roar of the central 
 sea, so is thy loneliness to Mine. When God 
 throws his arms around a soul and draws that 
 soul away from its companions, and to Himself, 
 then is that soul very lonely, but the loneliness 
 is but the being gathered to the heart of God" 
 
 Then said the man : "By Thee all that is in 
 heaven above or in the earth beneath was 
 created. Thou hast but to speak the word, and 
 lo ! a legion of angels are at Thy side, waiting 
 and willing to do Thy bidding, and to bear Thee 
 company by night or by day."
 
 8 THE LONELY GOD, 
 
 But God made answer : " That which I create, 
 be it angel or archangel, is but My creature, and 
 can never be My companion." 
 
 And again the man : " Thou art God the 
 Eternal One, Ruler of Earth and Sea. Is it 
 nothing to Thee that all men worship Thee and 
 hold Thee in reverence ? " 
 
 But to him the Almighty made answer : 
 "The thought of God is, to most men, but a 
 plank to which they hope to cling when the 
 waters of death are closing over their heads. 
 How many are there, thinkest thou, who love 
 the God they have never seen, as thou lovest 
 thy wife and child ? " 
 
 And the man said : " Thou hast but to say 
 the word, and behold all men must love Thee." 
 
 But God answered him : "The love which I 
 compel, I care not for." 
 
 Then said the man: "Thou art God, the 
 Omnipotent One. Sun, moon, and stars sprang 
 into being at Thy bidding. Thou hadst but to 
 say, ' Let there be light/ and there was light ;
 
 THE LONELY GOD. 9 
 
 and Thou didst but breathe upon unclean and 
 inanimate clay, and lo ! it became an immortal 
 soul, clothed in a form divinely fair, and fash- 
 ioned in Thine own likeness ; and man, the heir 
 of eternity and image of God, came into being. 
 To Thee all things are possible ; and Thou hast 
 but to say, ' Let be ! ' to set at Thy side another 
 God, like even unto Thyself, that so Thou 
 mayst be alone no more." 
 
 And yet again God said : " That which I 
 create is but My creature, and can never be my 
 companion ; and from My loneliness, even Mine 
 own omnipotence is powerless to deliver me. 
 
 " Rememberest thou not of Him who was 
 slain on Calvary, that men taunted Him, say- 
 ing, ' He saved others : Himself He cannot 
 save, ? 
 
 " Even so from the loneliness wherefrom 
 God saveth others, Himself God cannot save. 
 
 " The cry in loneliness that rang from Cal- 
 vary's Cross rings throughout creation still. 
 Thou lookest out into the night, and thou shud-
 
 10 THE LONELY GOD. 
 
 derest not because of the blackness that 
 broods between earth and sky, but because 
 thou hast looked as into an abyss into the lone- 
 ly soul of God. Nature is lonely because of 
 God's loneliness. On every breeze is borne 
 were the ear of man attuned to hear it the 
 sound of innumerable lamentations, which is 
 Nature's echo of God's lonely cry. 
 
 " God shudders and, over the shining sur- 
 face of the sea, a sudden tremor flits. 
 
 " God hides His countenance and the sun- 
 shine fades from meadow and field, and dark- 
 ness covers the face of the sky. 
 
 " But on the shadowless, shining peaks of 
 Eternity, God sits lonely forever ; and into His 
 loneliness neither man nor Nature can enter. 
 Nay, of such loneliness as God's, the soul of 
 man cannot even conceive, for man's death is 
 not more lonely than God's life. 
 
 ' ' / am THE Loneliness : God is Loneliness and 
 Loneliness God''
 
 THE LONELY GOD. 11 
 
 The voice ceased, and the man awoke, and 
 knew that he had been dreaming. 
 
 Outside the wind made moan continually, and 
 from the tossing tree tops there came a sound 
 like the ceaseless sighing of the sea. 
 
 And, for a moment, the man gazed into the 
 black and brooding night, whence it seemed to 
 him that eyes of infinite sadness looked out of 
 the darkness into his own. 
 
 In the next, he had drawn the curtain and 
 turned from the window, that in the warmth 
 and light of the room and the caresses of his 
 waiting wife, he might cease even to remember 
 that he had dreamed a dream. 
 
 Yet sometimes, as he stands and listens to 
 the sea at midnight, there seems borne to him 
 on every breeze a sound like that of innumer- 
 able lamentations; and then the man thinks 
 again of his dream, and fancies that in sobbing 
 surge and wailing wind he hears the cry of the 
 lonely God.
 
 A STRANGE SIN.
 
 A STKANGE SIN. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Mr. Michael Armstrong. 
 
 NO one who was not brought into daily con- 
 tact with the poor of East Weerham could 
 realize the honour and reverence with which the 
 name of the man whom I will call in these pages 
 Michael Armstrong was associated ; and only 
 those who knew of the long series of generous 
 deeds, which had won for him the love of the 
 people, and who were aware, as I was, of the 
 purity and nobility of his life, could understand 
 the intense excitement and indignation which 
 were aroused in the district, when it became 
 known that he was in prison on a disgraceful 
 charge. 
 
 Mr. Armstrong, as I recollect him, was tall 
 and gaunt, with a stiff carriage and angular, 
 
 15
 
 16 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 square shoulders. His limbs were so fleshless 
 that his clothes seemed literally to hang upon 
 him ; and he had the appearance of a man who 
 had, at one time of his life endured terrible pri- 
 vations, .which had left him shattered in nerves 
 and in health. So emaciated was he that his 
 head always reminded me of a skull and, in- 
 deed, the bones of jaw, cheek and 'forehead 
 could distinctly be seen under the tense and 
 tightly-stretched skin of his sunken face. Thin 
 hair of a grizzled red was brushed across a high 
 and wide forehead, which was developed to an 
 extraordinary fulness at the temples ; and deep- 
 set red-brown eyes glittered with unnatural 
 brightness beneath the overhanging brows and 
 shaggy red eyebrows. A coarse, red mous- 
 tache stood out so stiffly over lips which had the 
 grey, death-stricken look of a consumptive that 
 the corners of the mouth were scarcely con- 
 cealed; and his skinny, knotty-knuckled, and 
 yellow hands shook with a strange nervousness 
 as he swiftly rolled up and lit the innumerable
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 17 
 
 cigarettes, without one of which he was seldom 
 seen. 
 
 He and my father were friends of many 
 years' standing, and when the failure of a bank, 
 followed almost immediately by my father's 
 death, left me penniless, Mr. Armstrong, who 
 was a man of means and a bachelor, insisted 
 that I should make my home with him, offering 
 me a sufficient income in return for my services 
 as his private secretary. He was, I think, the 
 most melancholy and moody man I have ever 
 known, and every year his melancholy seemed 
 to become more marked and more morbid. 
 
 To what it was attributable I do not to this 
 day know, except in a vague way, and my 
 father, as he has often told me, never knew at 
 all. That it was not, as was sometimes sug- 
 gested, due to religious causes seemed evident 
 from the fact that Mr. Armstrong never spoke 
 of, or made any outward profession of religion, 
 and never under" any circumstances entered a 
 chapel or church.
 
 18 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the whole tone and 
 tenour of his life seemed to me, who knew him 
 best, intensely religious. For sickness, suffer- 
 ing, or want he had an intuitive instinct, and I 
 have known him ready with sympathy or assist- 
 ance in cases where not even intimate friends 
 had suspected that of sympathy or assistance 
 there was any need. 
 
 Was a hard-working family struggling to pay 
 its way or to keep up an appearance of respect- 
 ability under the pinch of want, Mr. Armstrong 
 was sure, by some mysterious means, to become 
 acquainted with the facts, and to hit upon a 
 delicately-devised plan by which he might assist 
 without wounding what he considered honour 
 able pride. 
 
 When diphtheria \vas decimating one of the 
 poorest and most squalid quarters of the town, 
 it was Mr. Armstrong who, as was frequently 
 said, " saved more lives than the doctors," and 
 who, heedless of his own health or of the dan* 
 gers of infection, gave himself up, body and
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 19 
 
 soul, to the service of the sufferers. One would 
 scarcely suppose that so melancholy a man 
 would prove a welcome visitor in sickness; but, 
 sincere and unaffected as his melancholy un- 
 doubtedly was, he never carried it with him to 
 the cottages of the poor or to the sick-room. 
 Women of all ranks he invariably treated with 
 a certain gentle deference which, though very 
 marked, was perfectly natural to him ; and I 
 never yet saw the child in whom he did not seem 
 to inspire an instinctive liking and trust. 
 
 All this I learned from my father, or discov- 
 ered little by little for myself, for if ever there 
 was a man who did good by stealth it was Mich- 
 ael Armstrong. He had indeed, the most sin- 
 gular and morbid dislike to having his benevo- 
 lence known or even alluded to. Gentle as was 
 his manner generally, an allusion to his gener- 
 osity would lead to a passionate outburst of 
 fierce invective which, after it was over, would 
 leave him moody, morose and irritable for days. 
 More than one well-meaning clergyman or min-
 
 20 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 ister under whose notice some charitable deed 
 of Mr. Armstrong's had directly or indirectly 
 come, and who had ventured on an appreciative 
 word, has to my knowledge, been given to un- 
 derstand that his remarks were considered as 
 an impertinent and unwarrantable intrusion 
 upon the private affairs of another. 
 
 Mr. Armstrong's account books, which are in 
 my possession, show that he subscribed large 
 amounts anonymously to many deserving insti- 
 tutions, although his name never, under any 
 circumstances, appeared in subscription lists. 
 And yet, if invited personally to subscribe to 
 these very institutions, or if called upon by 
 those who were collecting for some local charity, 
 to which he had already contributed anony- 
 mously, he would refuse in so curt and churlish 
 a manner that the request was not likely to be 
 repeated. 
 
 At first people feared him, and spoke of him 
 as an unmannerly bear ; but no one can do 
 good, day by day, in a country town, no matter
 
 A STRANGE SIN, 21 
 
 how stealthily he do it, and keep his well-doing 
 a secret. Little by little the truth leaked out, 
 and while the upper and middle classes re- 
 garded Mr. Armstrong as an eccentric but noble- 
 hearted man, the poor of the district simply 
 worshipped him.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Arrest. 
 
 THINGS went on in this way for many years, 
 during each of which Mr. Armstrong 
 seemed to grow more melancholy, brooding 
 and careworn, until one day the town, and in 
 fact the whole neighborhood, was thrown into 
 a state of intense and unprecedented excite- 
 ment by the news that he was in custody upon 
 a serious charge. I do not propose, in this 
 narrative, to enter upon anything which is not 
 necessary to a right understanding of essentials; 
 and into the particulars of Mr. Armstrong's 
 offence I need not go further than to say it was 
 one which in a man of his reputation and posi- 
 tion would be considered peculiarly disgraceful. 
 That he had committed, or was even capable 
 of committing, such an offence was everywhere 
 declared a moral impossibility ; and that an 
 
 22
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 23 
 
 explanation, which would effectually clear him, 
 would sooner or later be forthcoming was held 
 by all. 
 
 Even men who, because their lives were 
 known to be low and dissolute, might have been 
 supposed ready to believe any charge against 
 the character of another, the blamelessness of 
 whose life was a silent condemnation of their 
 own even these men refrained, for once, from 
 trying to make capital out of the affair ; and 
 some of them did not hesitate to express their 
 hope that the accusation against Mr. Armstrong 
 would turn out to be unfounded. 
 
 And then, like the proverbial thunder out of 
 a clear sky, came the intelligence that Mr. 
 Armstrong had not only admitted his guilt, but 
 had absolutely refused to defend himself or to 
 allow himself to be defended. 
 
 Great as was the shock which the news of 
 his arrest had been, his admission of guilt was 
 a still greater shock, and for the first few 
 moments all who heard it looked at each other
 
 24 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 with faces of blank, mistrustful dismay, on 
 which were plainly written the questions : 
 "Whom, then, can we trust?" and, "Are all 
 men alike equally corrupt and rotten at heart ? " 
 But this wavering in the respect which was 
 felt for Mr. Armstrong was only temporary, and 
 the reaction in his favour, by which it was imme- 
 diately followed, carried him at once, as on the 
 crest of a huge billow, to a still higher place in 
 . the public sympathy, for the belief that the 
 crime had been committed during a moment of 
 mental aberration had scarcely been suggested 
 before it was universally accepted as the one 
 and only explanation of the case ; and great in- 
 dignation was expressed that no medical opin- 
 ion was taken with a view to sanctioning his 
 transference from the prison to an asylum.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Trial. 
 
 THE town of East Weerham, where all this 
 occurred, was at one time famous for the 
 collieries, which gave employment to some hun- 
 dreds of men ; and it so fell out that my 
 friend's arrest and trial took place within a few 
 weeks after a fearful accident in which many 
 lives were lost. 
 
 Mr. Armstrong, who, notwithstanding his 
 haggard looks and attenuated frame, was a 
 man of considerable physical strength and ca- 
 pable of great endurance, had been one of the 
 most active and hard-working of the "rescue" 
 party. He was in the first "cage" which de- 
 scended the burning mine, and had risked his 
 lite again and again in the perilous task of 
 searching for the dead. 
 
 25
 
 26 A STJtANGE SIA 7 . 
 
 It may well be supposed that the heroism and 
 untiring devotion which he had displayed dur_ 
 ing this terrible time had endeared him more 
 than ever to the hearts of the people, and it is 
 no matter for surprise that his arrest, almost' 
 immediately afterwards, should have aroused 
 intense excitement and sympathy among the 
 colliers, many of whom were then out of em- 
 ployment on account of the temporary stop- 
 page of work necessitated by the disaster. 
 
 As the hour for the trial approached, a vast 
 cro\vd, consisting of these unemployed colliers, 
 and of men, women and even children from 
 the surrounding villages and the poorest parts 
 of the district, collected in the large market 
 place, wjiere the town hall was situated, all 
 in such a state of distress and excitement that 
 the police became not only anxious but alarmed. 
 
 That the case should excite extraordinary 
 local interest was to be expected ; but as no 
 one, not even the poor people themselves for 
 the affair was in no sense an organized demon-
 
 A STKANGE SIN. 27 
 
 stration had anticipated such a gathering, the 
 necessity of increasing the police staff had not 
 occurred to the authorities. The whole of the 
 local constabulary did not amount to twenty 
 men, all told ; and as the nearest town of any 
 size was fifteen miles distant, it would be im- 
 possible in the event of a riot, to obtain rein- 
 forcements within several hours. 
 
 Two minutes after the doors were open the 
 court was full. The handful of police, who 
 had tried to stem the current, and maintain 
 some show of order, was practically powerless 
 against so great a number, and the judge 
 took his seat under such circumstances as 
 have probably never before occurred. 
 
 That such a scene as that which I am about to 
 describe should have been permitted in a court 
 of justice, will doubtless seem incredible to 
 some readers of this narrative ; and I admit that 
 the action of the judge was an extraordinary 
 departure from precedent, and was, from the 
 point of order, quite indefensible. But the
 
 28 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 entire circumstances under which the trial took 
 place were so exceptional that it seemed to be 
 tacitly recognized throughout the court that this 
 was no case in which the nice rules of legal 
 etiquette could be enforced. And moreover 
 the reader must remember that what I am de- 
 scribing took place twenty years ago and in a 
 small county town in the Northern midlands,
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 "God Bless Him!" 
 
 MR. ARMSTRONG'S was the first case on 
 the list, and I shall never forget the 
 scene which took place when his name was called 
 and his familiar figure was seen to enter the dock 
 from the back. The spectacle of the man they 
 so honoured and loved standing in that shameful 
 place was too much for those present; and as 
 if by common consent, there broke from that 
 great crowd a cry like that of a wounded ani- 
 mal, which was followed by a torrent of weep- 
 ing and wailing from the women, as the people 
 stood up, some with outstretched hands and 
 streaming eyes, to sob, " God bless him ! " 
 while those who were near the dock struggled 
 and pressed to shake his hand, or even, in one 
 or two instances, to kiss the sleeve of his coat.
 
 30 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 Scandalized at so unheard-of an outrage upon 
 the majesty of the law, the dozen or so police- 
 men who were in the court struggled and 
 pushed about vigorously among the packed and 
 heaving masses ; but their indignant threats 
 and cries of " Order ! " passed unregarded, 
 and indeed, were scarcely heard among the 
 sobs and benedictions of the people. 
 
 Under ordinary circumstances the judge 
 would have given orders for the court to be 
 cleared. To do so in this instance would have 
 been to provoke a riot ; and after a short con- 
 sultation with the head of the police, he very 
 wisely adopted a course which, if it set, as I have 
 already said, precedent and legal etiquette at 
 defiance, had the result of quieting the people 
 and preventing a disturbance. 
 
 " This expression of your respect and affec- 
 tion for Mr. Armstrong " I noticed that at no 
 stage of the trial did the judge ever refer to 
 the occupant of the dock as the " prisoner " 
 " does you and him honour," he said, as soon as
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 31 
 
 he could make himself heard, " but I cannot 
 allow this uproar to proceed, and unless order 
 is immediately restored, the Court will rise, 
 and the case be sent elsewhere for trial. Such 
 a course will only prolong Mr. Armstrong's 
 suspense and anxiety, and I trust that for his 
 sake, if for no other reason, you will control 
 your feelings." 
 
 This had some effect in quelling the tumult, 
 and Mr. Armstrong, whom it had been thought 
 advisable to take out of court lest the uproar 
 should result in a riot, and an organized attempt 
 at rescue be made, was brought back. 
 
 He had scarcely taken his place again before 
 a sickly-looking woman, who had been swept 
 in on the crest of the crowd, and carried up 
 close to the dock, stretched out a gaunt be- 
 shawled arm towards him, while with the other 
 she clasped to her bosom a little child, almost a 
 baby ; and the wee, white-faced creature, catch- 
 ing sight of the familiar features of the prison- 
 er, smiled up at him, and held out a baby hand,
 
 32 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 as if in expectation of the cake or sweetmeat 
 which it had learned to associate with his en- 
 trance. 
 
 " Don't believe anything bad against Mr. 
 Armstrong, sir," cried the woman, turning ap- 
 pealingly to the judge. " ' Im couldn't do 
 nothing bad, if 'im tried. I know 'twas 'im 
 saved my poor 'usband's life down yon mine ; 
 and but for Mr. Armstrong, there's a many 'ere 
 as 'ud starved afore now." 
 
 Again the storm of weeping and wailing 
 broke forth as one poor creature after another 
 strove vainly, amid the tumult, to bear her shrill 
 testimony to the kindly deeds of the prisoner ; 
 but up to this point the crowd, except in mani- 
 festations of sympathy and affection, had shown 
 no disposition to behave other than peacefully. 
 At this stage of the proceedings, however two 
 policemen, fearing a rush towards the dock, 
 took up their position inside it ; and the sight 
 of Mr. Armstrong, standing guarded on either 
 side like a common felon, called forth such a
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 33 
 
 roar of rage and indignation, that had not the 
 prisoner himself again and again held up his 
 hand, in deprecating and imploring remon- 
 strance, a rush would then and there have been 
 made to rescue him, and a serious riot would 
 undoubtedly have ensued. 
 
 D
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 "Guilty or Not GuUty?" 
 
 SOMETHING like order was at last restored 
 and the trial proceeded with, the proofs 
 which were brought forward of the prisoner's 
 guilt being conclusive and convincing. It so hap- 
 pened that, with the exception of the judge 
 (and even he, I afterwards learned, had for 
 many years been aware of the noble work 
 which Mr. Armstrong was doing), nearly all 
 who were engaged upon the case were resi- 
 dents in the district, and knew the accused per- 
 sonally, or were acquainted with the unselfish- 
 ness and nobility of his life. It was for this 
 reason probably that the prosecution was as 
 half-hearted as it was, for the evidence against 
 Mr. Armstrong was given and elicited with un- 
 concealed reluctance. 
 
 31
 
 A STXANGE SIN. 35 
 
 When the judge asked, merely as a matter 
 of form, if charges of a similar or any other 
 nature had been made against the accused in 
 the past, the question remained for a moment 
 unanswered, not because there could be any 
 doubt about a reply, but because, as Mr. Arm- 
 strong was unrepresented, some hesitation was 
 felt as to who was the proper person to re- 
 spond. 
 
 The hesitation was, however, only moment- 
 ary the counsel for the prosecution taking 
 upon himself to answer with marked emphasis 
 that, on the contrary, no breath of scandal had 
 ever attached to Mr. Armstrong's name before, 
 and that there were witnesses without number, 
 and representing all classes of society, who 
 were willing and wishful to come forward and 
 give evidence as to the universal respect and 
 honour in which he was held. 
 
 For a professional adversary to voluntarily 
 make an admission which tells against his own 
 case is very unusual, and this chivalrous and
 
 36 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 generous speech called forth a burst of enthu- 
 siastic cheering, which was again and again re- 
 newed, and only died away when Mr. Arm- 
 strong, with his characteristic dislike to hearing 
 himself lauded, stepped to the front of the dock, 
 and, with a gesture of intense annoyance, ex- 
 pressed, somewhat ungraciously, a wish that the 
 prosecution would confine its remarks to the 
 facts of the case. 
 
 And here I must say something about the 
 prisoner's general aspect and bearing through- 
 out the trial. 
 
 When the news of his arrest was first made 
 known, the opinion was generally expressed 
 that even if he were acquitted and declared to 
 leave the court without a stain upon his char- 
 acter, the disgrace and humiliation of being 
 accused, if only wrongfully, of such an offence 
 would kill him. 
 
 His melancholy had always made him appear 
 careworn and aged beyond his years, and many 
 of his friends expected that when he was seen
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 37 
 
 in court on the day of which I am writing, it 
 would be found that the time between his trial 
 and his arrest had sufficed to change him from 
 a comparatively young man to an old one. 
 
 Knowing his nervous, excitable and brooding 
 temperament as I did, I fully concurred in this 
 view, and indeed, feared the worst possible re- 
 sults, and I could scarcely believe the evidence 
 of my eyes when I saw him enter the dock, 
 looking younger by a score of years than he 
 had looked before his arrest. His figure was 
 more erect, and his bearing more alert and 
 vigorous, than it had been within many people's 
 recollection of him. The colour had come back 
 to his cheeks, and the light to his eyes, and 
 strangest of all, his habitual melancholy seemed 
 ' to have disappeared, and on his face there was 
 something" of the brightness and beauty ot 
 youth. 
 
 That this singular change was attributed, not 
 only by the spectators, but by the judge and 
 jury and notwithstanding the prisoner's having
 
 38 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 pleaded guilty to the consciousness of inno- 
 cence, seems likely enough ; and I believe it 
 was partly answerable for the evident prejudice 
 in his favour with which the case was conducted, 
 and for the intense desire to believe the best of 
 him which was manifested throughout. 
 
 The look of the man seemed positively in- 
 spired, and there was a dignity in his bearing 
 and a light on his face which made one think of 
 him as a martyr confronting persecution and 
 shame for conscience's sake, rather than as 
 a prisoner on his trial for a disgraceful charge. 
 
 The evidence was at last completed, and Mr. 
 Armstrong declining to say anything in his de- 
 fence, the jury were informed that the time had 
 come for them to consider their verdict. 
 
 After a few minutes' whispering, the foreman 
 intimated that there was no necessity to leave 
 the box, as they had already come to a decision. 
 
 The judge, at whom the clerk of the court 
 glanced as if asking whether or not he was to 
 proceed, seemed, now that the decisive moment
 
 'A STRANGE SIN. 39 
 
 had come, scarcely less moved and excited than 
 the spectators, and could not trust himself to 
 do more than make a hasty gesture of assent 
 with his hand ; and then, after the usual for- 
 malities, the question was put : 
 
 " Do you find the prisoner guilty or not 
 guilty?" 
 
 There was a momentary pause between the 
 question and the answer a pause which, though 
 it was only of a few seconds' duration, seemed 
 positively awful in absolute cessation of sound 
 and motion a pause in which every breath was 
 held, and in which it seemed as if the very 
 hearts of all present were standing still ; and 
 then, clear, firm and unhesitating, came the 
 answer, " Not guilty." 
 
 A choking gasp, as if that great assembly 
 had, like one man, come-to suddenly from a 
 swoon, quivered in the air, and then the spell 
 was broken, the overwrought nerves gave way, 
 and bursting from hundreds of throats, came 
 ringing cheer after ringing cheer, and peal after
 
 40 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 peal of uncontrollable and hysterical laughter, 
 as men shook hands again and again in the 
 wildest enthusiasm and excitement, and women 
 threw themseives into each others' arm to laugh, 
 to sob, or to pray. 
 
 It did not need that the words " Not guilty ! " 
 should be shouted by those around the door to 
 those who thronged the stairway, and thence 
 passed on from mouth to mouth, through the 
 packed hall and porch, to the waiting masses 
 outside. 
 
 They knew outside the meaning of that cheer, 
 and took it up, and re-echoed it again and 
 again with a roar which threatened to drown 
 the joyful din within. 
 
 But in all that scene of delirious gladness and 
 boundless excitement one face only looked 
 gray and old and stricken ; one form there 
 was which seemed, in the moments preceding 
 and following the delivery of the verdict to 
 pass from youth to age the form and face of 
 the man whom the united voice of the jury had
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 41 
 
 declared innocent of the crime with which he 
 was charged. 
 
 I watched Mr. Armstrong as he stood up to 
 hear the verdict, and could not but notice how 
 firm and manly was his bearing. His eyes were 
 bright, his face calm and confident, and so youth- 
 ful-looking that I could scarcely believe that 
 he and the moody, melancholy and time-worn 
 man I had known, were one and the same being. 
 
 He seemed to be upheld and sustained by 
 some faith and confidence such as inspired the 
 martyrs of old ; but as the words, " Not guilty," 
 passed the lips of the foreman, the colour faded 
 out from the prisoner's face and the light from 
 his eyes ; and a feeble old man, with a look like 
 that of death on his features, sank back into the 
 arms of the warders, only to leap up again, and 
 to the front of the dock, where, trembling from 
 head to foot with emotion, and with both hands 
 grasping the bar, he cried, passionately: 
 
 " I am guilty, as God is my witness, and I 
 claim to be justly judged ! "
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 A Disputed Verdict. 
 
 A SUDDEN, palpitating hush filled the 
 crowded court at these words, and then 
 something like a start ran through the assem- 
 bly as the foreman of the jury, who, it had not 
 been noticed, had remained standing, said in a 
 clear and incisive voice : 
 
 "I wish to add, my lord, that we are each 
 and all firmly convinced that at- the time the 
 offence with which Mr. Armstrong is charged 
 w r as committed, he must have been in a state 
 of mind in which he could not be held responsi- 
 ble for his actions, and it is for this reason that 
 we return a verdict of ' Not Guilty.' ' 
 
 As the foreman's last words died away, and 
 before the judge could make any remark, the 
 prisoner spoke again at first with an almost 
 painful slowness which was evidently the re-
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 43 
 
 suit of a tremendous effort to master himself, 
 but afterwards with consuming passion and fire. 
 
 " What I did, I did deliberately and wilfully, 
 and when I was in full possession of my'senses. 
 I decline to receive my freedom by means of a 
 lie, and I call upon you, my lord, to see that 
 no personal feeling be allowed to interfere with 
 the administration of justice." 
 
 "There is not one of you," he continued, al- 
 most fiercely, turningas he spoke to thejury, "who 
 believes in his heart that I am, or was, mad ; " 
 and then, with a sudden break in his voice, 
 " Some of you most of you are my friends. It 
 is possible that it may have been in my power to 
 render two or three of you a service. Oh ! if I 
 have any claim upon your gratitude or regard 
 if I have ever served you or my fellow towns- 
 men, or am in any way entitled to your respect, 
 I beg you, I beseech you, I abjure you, to be 
 true to your convictions and to your conscience, 
 and not to humiliate me by a verdict of acquit- 
 tal which you know in your hearts is a lie."
 
 44 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 Though the silence which fell upon the court 
 after this ringing and passionate appeal was 
 only of a few seconds' duration, it was painful 
 in its strained intensity, and when it was broken 
 by the first word of the judge's reply, the sense 
 of relief was so great that one long-drawn sigh 
 escaped from the lips of all. 
 
 He began by pointing out to the jury that 
 their verdict was utterly out of order, inasmuch 
 as they were not called upon to decide the 
 question of Mr. Armstrong's responsibility or 
 irresponsibility. All they were required to do 
 was to decide whether he was guilty or not 
 guilty of the offence with which he was charged. 
 But if they found the accused guilty; there was 
 nothing to prevent them from adding that in 
 their opinion he should not be held responsible, 
 as they were convinced that the offence was 
 committed at a time when he was not answera- 
 ble for his actions; and it would then remain for 
 him, the judge said, to remand Mr. Armstrong
 
 r A STKANGE SIN. 45 
 
 until medical opinion in regard to his mental 
 condition could be obtained. 
 
 When the jury returned to the box after half 
 an hour's deliberation, the foreman stood up to 
 say that they were prepared with a re-statement 
 of the verdict, in accordance with the judge's 
 remarks. They would comply with the regu- 
 lations which it was necessary to observe in 
 such circumstances, and return a formal verdict 
 of guilty ; but they were one and all convinced 
 that the offence was committed when the ac- 
 cused was utterly unanswerable for what he did. 
 
 Mr. Armstrong's protestation of his full re- 
 sponsibility in regard to his actions was, the 
 jury believed, a common feature in such cases. 
 They considered, the foreman went on to say, 
 that the circumstances under which the offence 
 was committed were such that no one, not ab- 
 solutely an idiot, could hope to escape detection 
 and conviction. So far from being wanting in 
 shrewdness and in common sense, Mr. Arm- 
 strong, when in possession of his faculties, and
 
 46 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 notwithstanding- his eccentricity, was known to 
 be a man of keen perception and exceptional 
 clear-sightedness. That such a man a man 
 of high social position and honourable reputation; 
 a man who had for twenty years lived openly 
 among them, and who, if he had any propensity 
 for evil-doing, was in possession of the means 
 to follow his inclination where there would be 
 little fear of detection could, when in posses- 
 sion of his faculties, be capable of such incredible 
 folly as to commit, in the very town in which 
 he was universally known, an offence like that 
 with which he was charged, could not be seri- 
 ously entertained by the jury. And if further 
 proof of his mental aberration were needed, the 
 jury believed it was to be found, not only in the 
 fact that the accused had refused the right to 
 be defended a right to which the lowest crim- 
 inal was entitled but also in the extraordinary 
 scene which they had just witnessed, and in his 
 persisting, in the face of an acquittal, in de- 
 claring his guilt. " Our verdict of ' guilty ' is
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 47 
 
 then, we wish it to be understood," said the 
 foreman of the jury, in conclusion, " tantamount 
 to a unanimous acquittal. We honour Mr. Arm- 
 strong for his noble, if quixotic conscientious- 
 ness, in wishing to suffer punishment for an 
 offence for which he, mistakenly, believes him- 
 self responsible ; but nothing could convince 
 us, who know him so well, that he could wil- 
 fully commit, or even wish to commit, a dis- 
 honourable action." 
 
 Again a mighty and approving roar broke 
 forth from the packed and heaving masses, but 
 it ceased as suddenly as it had commenced, 
 when the prisoner was seen staggering forward 
 to the front of the dock. For one-half minute 
 he stood swaying backward and forward as if 
 about to fall, and then he lifted a face, working 
 and distorted with anguish, to the window which 
 lighted the court from the roof, and throwing 
 his arms upward, cried out in a voice to which 
 it was terrible to listen :
 
 48 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 " I appeal from earthly justice to divine ! 
 Judge Thou between them and me, O God, 
 and suffer not the guilty to go unpunished ! " 
 
 And then he fell back, with the blood gush- 
 ing from mouth and ears and nostrils a dying 
 man.
 
 M 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 A Strange Sin. 
 
 ANY of those who had most cause to be- 
 
 lieve in Mr. Armstrong's innocence, 
 seemed unable after his death to shake them- 
 selves free from a certain superstitious dread 
 concerning him, or to refrain from asking them- 
 selves if all could be right with a man whom God 
 had singled out for such an end ; and some did 
 not hesitate to say that they saw in the circum- 
 stances under which his death took place, the 
 swift visitation of divine judgment. 
 
 While by no means disposed to dispute the 
 interposition of Providence though the inter- 
 pretation I put upon that interposition was a 
 very different one Mr. Armstrong's death by 
 the bursting of a blood vessel on the brain 
 seemed to me in no wise strange or unnatural, 
 in consideration of the intense emotional strain 
 
 40
 
 50 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 under which he was labouring at the moment. 
 All this, however, it can answer no purpose to 
 discuss, but as the event which I have been de- 
 scribing happened twenty years ago, and no 
 one immediately concerned in the case is likely 
 to suffer by the truth being made known, I give 
 below part of a letter which I received from Mr. 
 Armstrong on the day following his arrest. 
 
 He began by solemnly charging me to make 
 no attempt either to defend him or to obtain his 
 release, and then went on as follows : 
 
 " When I was quite a young man excitable, 
 emotional, and of a deeply religious tempera- 
 ment I was suddenly subjected to a terrible 
 temptation to which, in a moment of unexpected 
 weakness, I yielded. The thing was hardly 
 done before I was overwhelmed with the most 
 awful remorse remorse which was the more 
 agonizing from the fact that I was unable to 
 satisfy my conscience by making reparation for 
 the wrong I had done, or by confessing my guilt,
 
 A STRANGE SIN, 51 
 
 " Reparation there could be none, for what 
 had been done could never be undone, and the 
 consolation of confession was equally denied 
 me, for to have made known my sin would have 
 brought misery and disgrace upon the innocent. 
 
 " You may call me morbid, or even mad, if 
 you will, but God is my witness that from that 
 day to this I have never known a moment's 
 peace of mind. Life closed for me in the hour 
 of the committal of the crime I have spoken of, 
 and the thing which has borne my likeness is 
 not myself but my phantom. 
 
 " I have stood aside and watched life's dance 
 of passion and joy go by, knowing that I was 
 but a ghost, and had no part to play among 
 living men and women. Dare I, who knew 
 that I had no right to take the hand of an hon- 
 est man in friendship, offer my love to any 
 honourable woman ? If I could only have made 
 confession of my crime, if I could only have 
 stood forth for what I was before all, I might 
 at last have proved my repentance, and have
 
 52 A STRANGE SIN. 
 
 earned the right to my own, and to others' re- 
 spect. But confession and atonement were, 
 for the reasons I have stated, alike denied me ; 
 and from that day to this I have walked the 
 world, conscious that I was a living, incarnate 
 Lie a thing which seemed white and fair be- 
 fore men, but which knew itself to be one of 
 the foulest and most loathsome creatures that 
 defile God's earth. 
 
 " Can you understand now why it was that 
 r l was always solitary, brooding and melancholy ? 
 Can you wonder now why every thoughtless 
 word of praise was to me who knew myself 
 for what I was, and who was seeking by the 
 complete surrender and sacrifice of self to atone 
 for the one irreparable wrong I had done like 
 the tearing away, by a rude hand, of the band- 
 age from an unhealed wound ? I have got up 
 in the night, after hearing such words of praise, 
 and looked at my reflection in the glass, until I 
 saw such loathing of myself expressed upon the 
 uncanny ghost-face which loomed out at me
 
 A STRANGE SIN. 53 
 
 from the silver twilight, that I could meet the 
 look in those eyes no longer, but slunk and 
 stole away with furtive, backward-cast glance, 
 like a guilty thing surprised ; and I remember 
 that once, in my hatred and abhorrence of my- 
 self, I struck the grinning thing with my clenched 
 fist, cutting my flesh to the bone and shivering 
 the glass to atoms. 
 
 " At last I felt that I could bear the burden 
 of my sin no more. To stand in the dock or 
 on the scaffold, would be a very heaven in com- 
 parison with the hell of knowing and loathing 
 myself as a hypocrite, to which I was each day 
 condemned ; and, at last, I decided to commit 
 some crime what, was of little matter so long 
 as it served to brand me as foul and debased 
 in the eyes of all, and so long, too, as no fellow 
 creature suffered injury or debasement thereby. 
 
 "And so it was that I determined to commit, 
 or to go through a form of committing (for the 
 thing itself I had no feeling but loathing and 
 abhorrence), the offence with which I am
 
 54 A STXANGE SIN. 
 
 charged, and I planned it to take place at such 
 a time, and under such circumstances, that de- 
 tection and conviction were inevitable. 
 
 "The rest you know ; and you know now, 
 too, why I have forbidden you to take any steps 
 to defend me, or to explain away my crime. 
 To do so would be to rob me of the one thing 
 for which I have longed as man never longed 
 for woman, the starving for bread, or the dying 
 for life. The cup of shame which I hold to my 
 lips is sweeter to me than ever was sunlight to 
 the prisoner in a dungeon ; for now at last, I 
 know that I shall not step into eternity an 
 incarnate Lie now, at last, I can face God 
 and man and my conscience again, for it is 
 better to be branded and shunned as a crim- 
 inal, than to walk God's earth the foulest 
 of all foul things upon it an unsuspected 
 hypocrite ! "
 
 A SUICIDE. 
 
 "Be not deceived: God is not mocked." GAL. vi., 7. 
 " And thou shall know that I am the Lord, and have heard all 
 thy blasphemies." EZEK.IAL 35, 12.
 
 A SUICIDE. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 London Bridge How I came to be there The letter, after re- 
 ceiving which, I determine to take my life and end my misery 
 I set out from my lodgings reach the bridge, and see, without being 
 seen, and for the last time, the face of the woman who has broken my 
 heart the river God and the man The man defies and taunts his 
 Maker, and with blasphemy upon his lips, leaps out into the night. 
 
 IT was midnight when I reached the water, 
 and over London Bridge two thin and 
 straggling human streams, which flowed as rest- 
 lessly on as the running of the river beneath 
 the arches, poured incessantly in opposite direc- 
 tions. I had very little recollection of how I 
 came to be there. I remembered a time was 
 it possible it could have been only that morn- 
 ing when my life lay fair and bright before 
 me ; but between that time and the time of 
 which I am speaking, there yawned an impassa- 
 
 57
 
 58 A SUICIDE. 
 
 ble gulf, and .1 seemed to have lived centuries 
 since the blow had fallen. 
 
 It was in the morning, and while I was sitting 
 at breakfast, that the news which wrecked my 
 life had reached me, and evening found me ly- 
 ing humped in the same chair, with head on 
 breast, and hollow, haggard eyes a-stare, and 
 the letter, which told me that the woman I loved 
 had betrayed and deceived me, still fluttering 
 in the fingers of the nerveless hand that dropped 
 over the chair-back. I was as one paralyzed. 
 My brain had stopped just as a drowning man's 
 watch stops, on coming in contact with the 
 water at the moment when I had received the 
 blow. As the hands of the watch of the man, 
 who has met his death by drowning, indicate 
 only the time when to him time ceased to be, 
 so on the dial of my consciousness there was 
 recorded but one fateful fact ; and into one 
 fierce focal point of light the realization of my 
 misery all the thoughts which passed through 
 the burning glass of my brain were concentrated.
 
 A SUICIDE. 59 
 
 Suddenly I started convulsively, catching. my 
 breath and clenching my hand, until the letter 
 which lay in it was crushed to a ball ; for, like 
 the dart of a serpent's tongue upon a sleeping 
 bird, the thought that I had it in my power to 
 end my misery darted through my deadened 
 brain. 
 
 Just as I had been previously dominated by 
 the one thought of my wretchedness, so now, I 
 was alone possessed by the one thought of sui- 
 cide. All the slumbering hounds of conscious- 
 ness gave tongue at that thought, and swept on 
 at full cry in wild pursuit ; and that thought I 
 set before me, as the runner sets the mark 
 towards which to press. 
 
 Self-interest, Expediency and Religion sprang 
 up clamoring, and, knocking at the door of my 
 brain, cried out, "What will it profit thee, if 
 thou doest this thing ? Knowest thou not that 
 punishment will await thee hereafter?" but 
 them I let knock at an unopened door ; and 
 when Conscience arose, and, placing herself in
 
 60 A SUICIDE. 
 
 my pathway, strove with despairing hands to 
 drag me back, I would not as much as let my 
 eyes rest upon her, but, turning from her, cried 
 out, " This thing I will do, and must ! " 
 
 How or when I left my lodgings, I have no 
 knowledge ; but my next recollection is that of 
 finding myself in the street. Stooping and 
 slouched, with head on breast and burning 
 eyes, and choosing always the darkest street 
 and crossing, I slunk doggedly on, shrinking 
 from, and yet scarcely heeding the passers, un- 
 til at last I reached the bridge, and, with shoul- 
 der hunched to the wall, dragged myself slowly 
 along to the first recess, and paused to peer 
 over the parapet upon the water. 
 
 Westward the Cannon Street viaduct barred 
 the view of the river, and through the cold 
 shine of the electric lights, the gas lamps on 
 the distant embankment burned yellow and 
 dim. A train, labouring like a blown runner, 
 puffed panting over the bridge. For one sec- 
 ond the electric light flickered from glare to
 
 A SUICIDE. 61 
 
 gloom, and then flared out into a dazzling, 
 purplish-pink, which lit every carriage with such 
 startling distinctness that the features of the 
 passengers were plainly visible. A face looked 
 out across the water into mine, and I saw that 
 it was the face of the woman who had broken 
 my heart, and for love of whom I was there to 
 .take my life. Forgetful of the fact that the 
 blaze of light by which she was surrounded 
 would effectually blind her to all that lay out- 
 side ; forgetful of my wrongs, and of the ruin 
 she had brought to me, and of everything ex- 
 cept my wretchedness and the immeasurable 
 love I bore her, I stretched out my arms with 
 an eager and passionate cry ; but even as I did 
 so, she smiled and turned to speak to a com- 
 panion in the compartment, and in another 
 moment the train passed on, and was lost un- 
 der the huge half-cylinder which roofs the sta- 
 tion, leaving me alone upon the dark bridge, 
 and in the night as alone as I had been before 
 she had come into my life, as alone as I should
 
 62 A SUICIDE, 
 
 be in the death which I was there to seek. 
 Alone we live; alone we suffer and die, and 
 sympathy can avail us as little as hate. Your 
 sympathy is powerless to avert one pang of the 
 pain which tears me, for sympathy is but the 
 stretching of hands across an impassable gulf. 
 Even love resembles less the blending of 
 clouds upon the blue, than the sad vigil of 
 neighbouring stars. We are companions one to 
 another, we are affected by the nearness or 
 distance of the loved one, but never, ah ! never 
 do we touch. 
 
 Sick in soul and faint in body, (for I had had 
 no food since the morning), I turned and crossed 
 to the eastward side of the bridge. Below me, 
 in naked majesty, and with blear lights on the 
 right hand and on the left, like death candles 
 ranged by an Ethiop's corpse, brooded the 
 black mystery of the river. As I looked down 
 upon its waters here flowing with snaky and 
 treacherous swiftness under a surface as smooth 
 as glass ; there foaming in eddy and swirl, or
 
 A SUICIDE. 63 
 
 sliding as sullenly on as molten pitch, and 
 barred by the broken reflection of lights on 
 steamer and barge, my excited fancy seemed to 
 see the mouth of hell lying before me. I had 
 always thought of hell as a place far distant ; 
 but now I localized it immediately beneath the 
 water, and believed that I had but to plunge to 
 the other side of those inky waves to find hell 
 and all its horrors awaiting me horrors, which 
 I was, of my own free will, and not by the de- 
 cree of God or devil about to seek. I hugged 
 myself with a hideous pride as I thought of it. 
 Yes, the life, which men murder and lie to pro- 
 long, which they sell their souls to save, / was 
 about to fling unvalued from me. The hell, to 
 escape from which they shuffle and whimper 
 and cringe, and portion out their days into petty 
 rounds of fasting, church-going and prayer- this 
 hell, / was, of my own accord about to seek. 
 
 "Do Thy worst, O God!" I shrieked. 
 "Thou mayest be cruel, but Thou canst not be 
 more cruel than I can be to myself. I fear not
 
 64 A SUICIDE. 
 
 the death with which Thou dost terrify us here, 
 the hell with which Thou dost threaten us here- 
 after; and wert Thou, Thyself, to open for me the 
 gates of heaven, I would spurn Thy offer, and 
 fling myself of my own will into hell. Of my 
 own choice I came not into the world, but of 
 my own choice I can and will leave it ; and 
 Thou, O God, the Omnipotent, art powerless to 
 prevent me ! Behold, the thing which Thou 
 madest mocks Thee and defies Thee ! Thou 
 gavest me life, O God, and thus do I fling Thy 
 vile gift back! " 
 
 With a cry like the cry of a wild beast, I 
 sprang at a bound upon the parapet. For one 
 moment I tottered, swaying betwixt river and 
 sky above me the wan, white face of a swoon- 
 ing moon, below me the dark mystery of the 
 river, and then with impious hands upthrust to 
 the silent heaven, and with a shriek of blas- 
 phemy upon my lips, I sprang out, far out, into 
 the night.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 In the water A last struggle for life A drowning man's dreams < 
 I am a child again A youth The travail of a soul I face my doubts, 
 and declaring for atheism, burn my Bible The last of the pictures of 
 the past The final sensations of drowning, and the dreamy swooning 
 into death. 
 
 I REMEMBER that a momentary contraction 
 of the stomach and a sense of sickness 
 followed the leap. I can recall the hissing of 
 hot blood in my ears, the cold rush, as of a 
 mighty wind, but have no recollection of strik- 
 ing the water. 
 
 o 
 
 Then there came a sudden and deadly shock 
 of all-enveloping cold, which sent such torture 
 of cramp to every muscle, that my limbs were 
 drawn up distortedly to my body ; and in the 
 next moment I was battling and beating for 
 breath, fighting for life, and clutching at the un- 
 substantial water in such frenzy of fear, that it 
 
 was churned, as it closed over my head, into 
 
 F
 
 6J A SUICIDE. 
 
 crackling bubbles of foam. Blood and fire were 
 in my ears and mouth and nostrils. My eyes 
 were balls of flame, which lit up the cup of my 
 brain, and I saw red blood whirling round and 
 round in it, as water whirls in a whirlpool. 
 
 But slowly and surely, and with paralyzing 
 numbness, the cold stole through body and 
 limb. My struggles became less and less 
 fierce, and the fires flickered and went out. 
 From my brain the blood had cleared, and it 
 was now an empty chamber, into which I looked, 
 as one looks into a room through a window : 
 and I saw pictures come and go upon the walls. 
 
 ^j):******^: 
 
 A motherless, brotherless, sisterless child sat 
 alone in a little dark garret, so near the roof 
 that he could hear the rain-drops pattering upon 
 the tiles. The side walls of the garret slanted 
 upward and inward from the floor, so that there 
 was scarcely room to stand upright, except 
 where they met in a point overhead ; and the 
 little leaden-paned window by which he sat,
 
 A SUICIDE. 67 
 
 with his head upon his hands and his elbows 
 upon the sill, was set so far back into the room, 
 that his view was limited to the sky and the 
 upper windows of an opposite house. But it 
 was a warm, wet, summer Sunday evening, and 
 one of these windows, from which there floated 
 the words of an evening hymn, was open, and 
 he could see a group of happy-faced children 
 gathered around an old piano, in a small and 
 shabby but homelike room. As he looked at 
 the uplifted, worshipping face of the young 
 mother, and watched her white fingers wander- 
 ing reverently among the keys, he saw her 
 turn with a loving smile to slip an arm around 
 a little pinafored, pink-cheeked fellow of his own 
 age at her side ; and then the picture faded out 
 and was succeeded by another. 
 
 A heavy-mouthed, dark-eyed lad, sallow of 
 complexion, and with straight, stiff hair, thick- 
 massed and growing low down over scowling 
 brows, sat with his feet upon the fender and his
 
 63 A SUICIDE. 
 
 elbows on his knees, looking sullenly and fix- 
 edly at the fire which burned in the grate of a 
 dingy parlour. His chin was rested upon the 
 cup of his right hand, his fingers being hooked 
 till the tips touched the teeth ; and as he sat, 
 he bit steadily, almost viciously, at his nails. 
 His left hand was buried in the shaggy hair that 
 was bushed over his ears, and on a chair by his 
 side lay an open Bible. Some strange emotion 
 stirred within him. His nostrils dilated and 
 quivered, -and in his eyes there was a dull and 
 lurid glow, like the reflection of subterranean 
 fires upon the belly of clouds that hang over 
 the mouth of a volcano. Suddenly he flung 
 himself, rather than rose, to his feet, and began 
 to pace restlessly to and fro, talking aloud to 
 himself as he did so. 
 
 "It is to the abject fear of death, the fear 
 which makes us crave for something super- 
 human to cling to, when the human can avail 
 us no more," he said, "that the world owes its 
 conception of a God. We are cowards who
 
 A SUICIDE. 69 
 
 would rather lull our fears to rest with a lie, 
 than face the inevitable facts. All the religions 
 of the world are rivers that rise from one self- 
 ish source ; and were there no death, God 
 would be but a subject for the curious specula- 
 tion of the philosopher, and the majority of men 
 would concern themselves as little about Him 
 as they do about the plurality of worlds. But 
 death is, and must be faced ; and so we try to 
 bolster up our failing courage, by dogmatizing 
 about a Divine Being, who will do and be for 
 us, what we cannot do and be for ourselves. 
 And we are not even honest in our thoughts 
 about the Deity we fable. Events are daily 
 happening which cannot be reconciled with our 
 theory of an Omnipotent and Benevolent Ruler ; 
 but rather than make use of our reason and 
 think for ourselves, we profess a blind faith in the 
 divine justice, and declare that what is, must be 
 right, because it is of God's ordaining. Just as 
 the Roman Catholic seeks to evade his respon- 
 sibilities, by accepting, in the place of his abdi-
 
 70 A SUICIDE. 
 
 cated reason, an infallible church, which think?, 
 prays, believes, atones for, and absolves him, 
 so we try to evade the questions which confront 
 us, by referring them back to that dead-letter 
 office the will of an Almighty Creator to 
 which we relegate all the disquieting problems 
 and undelivered mental packets, for which we 
 cannot find a place in the sorting-box of our 
 reason. Our minds are like so many oysters, 
 each of which is perpetually perplexed with an 
 unanswerable problem in place of a grain of 
 sand ; and when we cannot get rid of the gritty 
 cause of our uneasiness, we cover it over with a 
 coating of fine words, and call it our conception 
 of a God. 
 
 " I look down at this marvellous body of mine 
 these fingers which open and shut at my bid- 
 ding, these limbs which so anticipate my wish, 
 that they act in accordance with it, before I am 
 aware of having put my will into action ; and I 
 look in at the mystery of this strangely self- 
 conscious shade this 'myself as I call it
 
 A SUICIDE. 71 
 
 which from behind the window curtains of a lit- 
 tle chamber, at the back of my eyes, looks out, 
 unseen, upon the world, and I ask myself who 
 t am and where I came from ; and when I can- 
 not find an answer to my question, I put it away 
 from me unanswered, by falling back upon the 
 figment of a Divine Creator, knowing all the 
 time that to account for the unaccountable by 
 presupposing the existence of an Infinite and 
 Omnipotent Being, brooding in lonely grandeur 
 athwart the waste spaces of eternity, or hover- 
 ing, bird-like, over the world, as over a nest, 
 and with outstretched wings that span the uni- 
 verse, is but attempting to dispose of one 
 mystery by hiding it in the shadow of another 
 a thousand-fold more unfathomable ; is but 
 seeking to set the mind at rest by asking it to 
 believe something which is monstrously incredi- 
 ble. Why should there be a Supreme Being ? 
 Who gave God the right to be God ? And is 
 there any justice in one All-greedy, All-grasping 
 Power, arrogating omnipotence to himself? "
 
 72 A SUICIDE. 
 
 He stooped, and taking the open Bible from 
 the chair, flung it face downward upon the fire ; 
 and as he did so, the picture faded out and was 
 
 succeeded by another. 
 ******** * 
 
 It w r as early summer, and two lovers were 
 following a path through a meadow thick-sown 
 with tender corn, over which, as the wind swept 
 the tremulous sheen of the emerald banner- 
 blades to shivering silver, there rose and sank 
 a soft and willowy stirring, which was like the 
 sigh of a soul passing out on its way to God. 
 The face of the man was the face of the lonely 
 child and of the lonely lad ; and the face of the 
 woman was the face which had looked out at 
 me that evening across the river. And at the 
 sight of that face, the last of the pictures faded 
 away, and I was back in my room again, and 
 reading the fatal letter I was slinking doggedly 
 on by street and crossing, with brain on fire, 
 and all my thoughts bent on ending my misery 
 I stood upon the bridge with hell and hatred to
 
 A SUICIDE. 73 
 
 God in my heart and I was battling and beat- 
 ing for breath, fighting for life, and clutching at 
 the unsubstantial water in my drowning agony. 
 And then it seemed to me that I had drifted out 
 into the open sea, and lay buried beneath such 
 a weight of waters that I was able to stir neither 
 hand nor foot. I could see, through a softened 
 and subdued haze of greenish light which swam 
 around me, the little hollows and hills among 
 the shingle and shells, the banks of white and 
 shelving sand ; and overhead, like a sheet of 
 ice or silvered glass, the under side of the sur- 
 face of the sea. Bubbles floated upward from 
 my mouth, and coated this under side with shin- 
 ing pearls. Here and there the water-atmos- 
 phere of my submarine world was shot with 
 silvery streaks and . spears of refracted light ; 
 and I could see filaments of seaweed combed 
 out in long ribbons upon the water, and floating 
 and fluttering above me like emerald pennons 
 streaming in a breeze.
 
 74 A SUICIDE. 
 
 After a time the weight upon my breast 
 lightened, and finally passed away into a dreamy 
 peace. I closed my eyes, and a delicious drowsi- 
 ness stole over brain and limb. My body 
 swayed in unison with a gentle undulation in 
 the water, as though the kindly sea had stooped 
 to clasp her strong arms around me, and to 
 rock me to sleep upon her breast. There was 
 the singing as of a sweet slumber song in my 
 ears. One by one the record of the years faded 
 out from my brain. I was a lad a child a 
 babe. My cheek nestled against a warm, soft 
 pulsing bosom ; my brow was light-brushed by 
 a waving ringlet, as lips, which whispered a 
 prayer that God would keep me innocent and 
 pure, were pressed upon mine. For one 
 moment I opened my eyes to look up into the 
 beautiful face, and into the love-filled and lumi- 
 nous eyes of the young mother whom I had 
 never seen ; and then, with one deep sigh of 
 infinite content, I closed my eyes and fell into 
 a dreamless slumber.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 My awakening The punishment of the Suicide My promise. 
 
 SLOWLY but surely, thought and sensation 
 came back to me, and I awoke, with a 
 nameless horror at my heart, to find myself ly- 
 ing on my back, and staring up fixedly at the 
 ceiling of my own room the room in which I 
 had received and read the letter, and which, 
 when I set out to take my life, I never expected 
 again to see. I strove to raise myself to a sit- 
 ting posture ; but though my brain was clear 
 and active, I seemed to have lost all power 
 over my limbs. Next I tried to turn my eye- 
 balls in their sockets that I might look around 
 me ; but I found that they were stiff and set, 
 and that I had as little control over them as 
 over my body. And then a great cry of shud- 
 dering and unutterable horror welled up in my 
 heart ; but my drawn lips gave no utterance to 
 
 75
 
 76 A SUICIDE. 
 
 it, for I was lying dead in my coffin, and the 
 footsteps of those who came to bear me to the 
 grave might, even then, be upon the stair. 
 
 For this is the judgment which awaits the 
 suicide: that, though he kill the corporeal 
 life, he cannot disentangle the dead body from 
 the living spirit, but must lie there a conscious 
 corpse, aware of the coming interment and de- 
 composition, which he is powerless to hinder or 
 to avert. 
 
 The will of God cannot by mortal cunning be 
 evaded. The Creator may not by His creature 
 be outwitted and defied ; for our life, as well as 
 the length of it, is of God's and not of our or- 
 daining, and can be terminated, not by any act 
 of ours, but only by His decree. 
 
 H: ****5|<** 
 
 At last the time came when I knew, by the 
 rattling of the earth upon the lid, that the coffin 
 was being lowered into the grave. I remember 
 that then, when it was too late, God or the 
 devil mocked me by restoring to me some
 
 A SUICIDE. 77 
 
 measure of power over my limbs, and that I 
 clenched my hands, until the dry nails peeled 
 off like wound-scabs, and the flesh fell away in 
 flakes from the bone. 
 
 "Kill me, O God !" I shrieked. "Kill me, 
 O God or Devil ! and I who curse thee now, will 
 bless thee and worship Thee Thee, God, or 
 thee, Devil, if thou wilt but promise to kill 
 me, and to cast me out into everlasting night ! " 
 
 Like the rattling of teeth in a skull, my 
 voice rattled from the hollow sides of the coffin, 
 and died away, unechoed, amid the walls of 
 dead and oozy clay which closed me in ; but 
 neither Hell nor Heaven gave answer to my 
 prayer. Though there was scarcely room to 
 turn or to move in the coffin, I managed, by 
 one supreme and frenzied effort, to double my 
 straightened arms with the fists under my chin 
 and the elbows outward ; and then, with the 
 superhuman strength of a madman, I strained 
 against the boards which shut me in. The 
 strings of my eyeballs cracked, but the oaken
 
 78 A SUICIDE. 
 
 walls gave slightly, and as, once more, I 
 wrenched my arms apart and against the sides, 
 there was a sound of breaking timber, and 
 my God ! was it possible ? Light ! Light 1 
 and the light of day ! 
 
 I was in a room ; it looked like a hospital, 
 and I heard the sound of a voice : 
 
 " He's had a hard time of it, doctor, but I 
 think he's coming round at last. Don't hand 
 him over to the police, poor devil ! No one 
 can swear it was suicide but me, and hang me 
 if I'll appear against him ! " 
 
 "It's a risky thing you're doing, my boy 
 condoning an offence of that sort," was the an-' 
 swer, "but if he promises never to attempt 
 anything of the kind again, I'm willing to keep 
 the secret." 
 
 And I promised.
 
 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 
 
 (A STORY FOR CHILDREN FROM EIGHT TO EIGHTY.)
 
 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 IT was broad noonday in the garden, and so 
 hot that one could see the air palpitating 
 and quivering above the gravel paths in undul- 
 ant haze of heat. Even the butterfly gasped 
 for breath, and grumbled because the swaying 
 of the grasses set stirring a warm puff, which 
 was like the opening of an oven. The sun 
 seemed so near, and was trying so hard to be 
 hot, that the daisies said they could see him 
 spinning and panting as he stood above them ; 
 but that, I think, was only their fancy, although 
 it is true that he was shining so exactly over- 
 head, that there was not a streak of shadow 
 where one could creep from shelter from the 
 sweltering heat. All the flowers were parched 
 and drooping, and except for the passing buzz 
 where a bee went drowsily by, or buried him- 
 
 G
 
 82 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 
 
 self with a contented burr in the heart of a 
 pansy, not a sound stirred the sultry silence. 
 
 All at once there was a sudden scurry among 
 the birds. A cat which had been basking and 
 purring in the sunshine, opening and shutting 
 an eye every now and then to make believe 
 that she was not sleepy, had dropped off into a 
 doze, and now yawned and awakened ; and this 
 was the signal for a general stir. 
 
 " Phew ! but it is hot, to be sure ! " ex- 
 claimed the butterfly, as he darted up for a 
 stretch from the poppy-head on which he had 
 been sitting, and went waltzing, anglewise, 
 down the gravelled path of the garden, lacing 
 the long, green lines of the boxwood bordering 
 with loops of crimson and gold. 
 
 " I hope my weight won't inconvenience you," 
 he said with airy politeness to the lily, dropping 
 himself lazily, and without waiting for an an- 
 swer, upon her delicate head, which drooped so 
 feebly beneath this new burden that several 
 scented petals fluttered fainting to the ground.
 
 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 83 
 
 " I am grieved to see you looking so sadly," he 
 continued, after he had settled himself to his 
 liking ; " but what on earth, my good soul, 
 makes you lean forward in that uncomfortable 
 attitude ? There is a charmingly shady spot 
 under the shelter of the wall behind you. Why 
 don't you lean in that direction ? As it is, you 
 are going out of your way to make yourself 
 uncomfortable, besides which / should very 
 much prefer to be out of the heat." 
 
 "I should be glad to move into the shade," 
 said the lily gently," but my sweetheart, the 
 rose, has fallen asleep by the border, and I am 
 leaning over her to keep the sun from her 
 buds." 
 
 " How very charming you are ! " lisped the 
 butterfly languidly, and in a tone of polite con- 
 tempt which seemed to imply, " and what a 
 fool ! " " But your ideas are a little crude, 
 don't you know ? though of course interesting. 
 It is easy to see you are not a person of the 
 world. When you have travelled about, and
 
 84 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 
 
 learnt as much as I have, you will come to look 
 at such things in a different way." 
 
 "Yes, you have travelled, and lived in the 
 world, and seen a great deal," said the lily ; 
 " but I have loved ; and it is by loving, as well 
 as by living, that one learns." 
 
 " Don't presume to lecture me ! " was the 
 impatient answer. "Fancy a flower finding 
 fault with a butterfly ! Don't you know that I 
 am your superior in the scale of being ! But, 
 tell me, does this love of which you speak 
 bring happiness ? " 
 
 "The greatest of all happiness," whispered 
 the lily almost to herself, and with infinite ten- 
 derness her white bells seeming to light up 
 and overflow, like human eyes, as she spoke. 
 " To love truly, and to be loved, is indeed to 
 be favoured of heaven. All the good things 
 which this world contains are not worthy to be 
 offered in exchange for the love of one faithful 
 heart."
 
 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 85 
 
 " Then I must learn to love," said the butter- 
 fly decisively, " for happiness has always been 
 my aim. Tell me how to begin." 
 
 " You II have to begin by ^learning," put 
 in a big double-dahlia, which was standing by 
 like a sentinel, and looking as stiff and stuck- 
 up as if he had just been appointed flower- 
 policeman to the garden. 
 
 " Don't you be afraid that any one's going to 
 fall in love with you," was the spiteful rejoinder 
 of the butterfly, edging himself round and 
 round on a lily-bell as he spoke. " Your place 
 is in the vegetable garden, along with the cauli- 
 flowers and the artichokes. There is some- 
 thing distinguished about a white chrysanthe- 
 mum, and the single-dahlias are shapely, al- 
 though they do stare so ; but the double- 
 dahlias ! " and the butterfly affected a pretty 
 shudder of horror which made the double- 
 dahlia stiffen on his stem with rage. 
 
 " How dare you speak slightingly of my 
 family!" he said indignantly. "And as for
 
 86 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 
 
 those big chrysanthemums ! why they're just 
 like tumbled heaps of worsted, or that shaggy- 
 eyed skye-terrior dog that we see sometimes in 
 the garden untidy, shapeless, lumpy things I 
 call them ! " 
 
 The butterfly, who had been alternately 
 opening and shutting his wings, as if he thought 
 the sight of such splendour was too dazzling to 
 be borne continuously, but really because he 
 knew that the sombre tinting which they dis- 
 played when closed, heightened, by contrast, 
 their gorgeous colouring when open, was 
 nothing if not well-bred, so he simply pre- 
 tended to stifle a yawn in the dahlia's face, 
 and to make believe that he had not heard what 
 was said. 
 
 "After all," he said, turning his back point- 
 edly upon the dahlia, and shutting up his wings 
 with a final snap -just as a fine lady closes a 
 fan "after all, my dear lily, I don't know 
 whether it's \vorth my while to learn to love ; 
 for, by this time next year, you and I will be
 
 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 87 
 
 dead, and it will be all the same then to us as 
 if we had never loved, or even lived at all." 
 
 " I know nothing about death," replied the 
 lily, "but no one who loves can doubt immor- 
 tality, and if the rose and I are not already im- 
 mortal, I believe that our love will make us so." 
 
 " What is this immortality? " said the butter- 
 fly. " I have heard the word used a great deal 
 in my wanderings, but I never quite knew the 
 meaning of it." 
 
 "It is the finding again after death of these 
 we have loved and lost ; and the loving and 
 living with them forever, I think," answered his 
 companion. 
 
 "I don't believe you know anything about 
 it," said the butterfly, decisively. "All the 
 men and women I've met and they ought to 
 know used ever so much longer words." 
 
 "Perhaps you are right," replied the lily 
 quietly, bending forward to shield a stray rose- 
 bud from the burning sun, but to be forever 
 with those I love would be immortality enough
 
 88 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 
 
 for me. And I heard the maiden who walks in 
 the garden, speaking yesterday, and I remem- 
 ber that she said it was more godlike to love 
 one little child purely and unselfishly than to 
 have a heart filled with a thousand vast vague 
 aspirations after things we can neither know 
 nor understand."
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 HOW strangely still it was in the garden ! 
 Summer had gone, and October was 
 nearly over, but the day had been so bright and 
 warm that every one said the winter must be a 
 very long way off. But since the sun went 
 down, the air had been getting more and more 
 chilly, and the stars were glittering like cold 
 steel, and the moon looked so bright and large, 
 that the flowers, which had awakened with an 
 icy pain at their hearts, could scarcely believe 
 that it was night and not day, for every tiny 
 grass-blade and buttercup stood out with start- 
 ling distinctness on the grass. A strange, 
 sharp scent was in the air, and a singular still- 
 ness was abroad. 
 
 There was no "going" in the trees, nor 
 bough-swing among the branches, but all stood 
 rigid and motionless as if intently listening. 
 
 89
 
 90 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 
 
 " Perhaps they are listening for the first foot- 
 fall of the winter the winter which is coming to 
 kill us," said the lily sadly, bending down, as 
 she spoke, to twine herself protectingly around 
 the rose. 
 
 " Perhaps we are dead already," said the 
 rose, with a shudder, " and are but ghost-flowers 
 in a ghostly garden. How cold and wan my 
 rosy petals look in this pallid light ! And is 
 this grey place blanched and silent and still as 
 death our sweet-scented and sunny garden, 
 that glowed with warm colour and was astir with 
 life?" 
 
 Just then, and before the lily could answer, 
 they heard a sudden cry of pain. 
 
 It was the butterfly who had fallen, half dead 
 with cold, from a sycamore bough, and now lay 
 shelterless and shivering on the frozen path. 
 " Creep up upon my leaves, dear butterfly," 
 said the lily, tenderly, as she bent towards him, 
 "and I will try and find a warm place for you 
 near my heart"
 
 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 91 
 
 " Oh, I'm so frightened ! I'm so frightened ! " 
 he sobbed. " The world is dying ; even now 
 the trees seem still and dead. Soon the stars 
 will fall out of the sky into the garden. Shall 
 we be left in darkness when the moon goes 
 out ? Already her face is deadly pale, although 
 she shines so brightly. And what has come to 
 the trees ? On every bough there sparkle a 
 thousand lights. Are they stars which have 
 dropped from the sky? " 
 
 "They are not stars at all," said the lily, 
 bending over him and hushing him to her heart 
 as a mother hushes a frightened child, " but 
 diamonds for the Frost King's crown. I think 
 we shall die to-night. Are you asleep, dear 
 rose ? The end is coming ; at least let us meet 
 it waking, and in each other's arms." 
 
 " It is coming, dear heart, and coming soon," 
 said the rose with a cry. " Already I can scarce 
 speak for pain. The night grows ever colder 
 and more cold. And how strangely bright the 
 moon is ! What was that streak of silver across
 
 92 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 
 
 the sky? A star which has fallen from its 
 place ? " 
 
 "I think 'twas the shining angel God sends 
 to fetch us," answered the lily. " Dear Love, 
 the end will soon be here. Already the pain 
 has reached my heart ; already I begin to die." 
 
 " And I, too," said the rose. "I sink I faint 
 the sharp pain stings and bites ! Hold me 
 fast, darling ! I scarce can see you now." 
 
 " Nor I you, sweetheart ! " 
 
 " Hold me closer closer. Everything seems 
 to fall away." 
 
 "Everything but love, dearest, and where 
 love is, all is. At least we shall die together." 
 
 Icier and more icy grew the air ; brighter and 
 whiter shone the moonlight on the garden, 
 until the sunflowers' shadow lay like ebony 
 upon silver along the grass ; colder and more 
 steely glittered the stars through the limpid 
 atmosphere ; and closer crept the pain to the 
 heart of the dying flowers. And all the long 
 night through the silent trees stood rigid and
 
 THE GARDEN OF GOD. 93 
 
 motionless, but now they listened no longer, for 
 winter was come indeed, and on every branch 
 the frost-crystals glinted and sparkled. 
 
 And when morning dawned the butterfly lay 
 dead for ever, but the lily and the rose were the 
 fairest flowers a-bloom in the Garden of God.
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 A strange punishment to the workers of iniquity." JOB xxxi., 3.
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The Man and the Woman. 
 
 u r ~T*HE apples of sin are all poisoned at the 
 1 core," she said, "and every unlawful 
 pleasure we pursue is transformed at last into 
 a hound that turns and rends us. There was a 
 time when you would have sold your soul to 
 call me yours ; and now well, now, you would 
 give the world to be rid of me. You would 
 murder me, I believe, if you dared, but you 
 haven't the courage to be criminal, and even 
 the relation in which we stand to each other 
 to-day was not of your bringing about. I left 
 home and husband to come to you, and though 
 
 you were not too moral to avail yourself of my 
 
 H 
 
 97
 
 98 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 madness, you were not man enough to look 
 God in the face, and say : ' I have sinned, and 
 must bear the consequences of my sinning : ' 
 but have whimpered ever since like a hound 
 that expects a whipping, and now you are pray- 
 ing to Him to rid you of me, that you may 
 marry some good and reputable woman, and 
 thus recover your respectability and your for- 
 feited hope of heaven." 
 
 I looked round, apprehensive of listeners, 
 but not a soul could be seen from the lonely 
 Belgian hillside upon which we were standing. 
 The one hotel of the village lay upon the other 
 side of the hill, and though I knew that the land- 
 lord and his wife had witnessed our quarrel in 
 the morning, it was not likely that they would 
 set any watch upon our subsequent pro- 
 ceedings. 
 
 How weary I was of this woman, no words 
 can say. Her's was a love which was always at 
 white heat, and unless I was continually pro- 
 testing my affection, I w r as charged with indif-
 
 THE APPLES OF SJ1V. 99 
 
 ference and change. Passion which has once 
 passed away will never return under protest, 
 and the kisses and caresses, which I had at one 
 time coveted, had become stale and joyless to 
 me, for she was lavish of them, and we do not 
 prize that which we are put to no pains to win. 
 She was right, too, in saying that I was too 
 cowardly to be criminal, and that I was seeking 
 an excuse to put an end to our connection. I 
 had often in my lifetime stepped aside from the 
 paths of right-doing into the by-ways of sin, but 
 I had taken care to keep an eye upon the road 
 whence I came, for I was too fearful of conse- 
 quences to wander far afield. When she and I 
 had slipt into sin together, I had had no inten- 
 tion of continuing in open defiance of the moral 
 law. The possibility of her leaving home and 
 husband to come to me, as she had done, had 
 never entered into my calculations ; and had it 
 not been that she had already made confession 
 of her infidelity, I should have insisted on her 
 immediate return.
 
 100 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 The time came, however, when I determined 
 to break with her ; but instead of telling her of 
 my intention to her face, I informed her that it 
 was necessary for me to go for a day or two to 
 Belgium on business, and thence I wrote to 
 her, saying that I had decided our connection 
 must end. To my surprise (for I had thought 
 that her pride would have prevented her from 
 taking such a step) she had followed me, to 
 make one last appeal, and hence it was that she 
 and I stood together that fatal morning upon 
 the lonely Belgian hillside.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ' Ye have scarce the soul of a louse," he said, 
 " But the roots of sin are there." 
 
 KIPLING'S " TOMLINSON." 
 
 ** \7OU cannot, you cannot want to leave me 
 1 now, and after all that has happened ! " 
 she continued. "You are my husband in the 
 sight of God, if not of the world, and I swear 
 that if you do not marry me, I will kill myself." 
 
 " Look ! " she cried, fumbling in the folds of 
 her dress and producing a pistol. "This is 
 yours. I took it from your dressing table in 
 the morning. Promise that you will marry me, 
 or I will shoot myself where I stand ! " 
 
 I made no answer, for I was thinking what 
 my life might have been had I never come 
 within her fatal influence of what it might yet 
 
 101
 
 102 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 be, if that influence were for ever withdrawn. 
 Wde she gone, I could look men and women 
 in the face once more, fearing nothing, and con- 
 cealing naught. I could range myself on the 
 side of right again, and no more hear myself 
 condemned in every law-breaker whom the 
 world cast out. I saw myself in imagination, no 
 longer the prey of unhallowed passion, but liv- 
 ing a life of sweet domestic bliss. Little children 
 climbed upon my knee to call me " father " and 
 a sweet woman-face the face of one, through 
 whose pure prayers and counsels, I should 
 forget and outlive my sin-stained past was for- 
 ever at my side. 
 
 Her words awoke a savage hope in my heart 
 the hope that she would carry out her threat, 
 and thus free me from a connection which 
 threatened to ruin my career, and which I had 
 long wished at an end, In wish and will I was 
 at that moment a murderer, although I was too 
 great a coward to let the thought of taking her 
 life, by any act of mine, as much as cross the
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 103 
 
 disc of my consciousness. But I knew well 
 that she was desperate, and that it was in my 
 power to drive her to madness by a single 
 word, or to soothe her to the gentleness of a 
 child. When I had been most inconsiderately 
 cruel to her (as men, God forgive them ! are, 
 sooner or later, cruel to the women who have 
 trusted them too well) her looks, as well as her 
 words of scorn, had shown how accurately she 
 guaged the selfishness of my nature. And yet 
 so inexplicable a mystery is a woman's love, 
 she, knowing me as she did, still clung to me 
 with an unreasoning and desperate infatuation, 
 upon which I had often coldly calculated, when 
 I had wanted to attain some selfish end. Some- 
 times, when our quarrels were at the worst, a 
 sudden revulsion of feelino- would come over 
 
 O 
 
 her, and she would cast herself at my feet 
 like a hound that crawls back to lick the hand 
 which has beaten it and look up into my face 
 with eyes of dumb, dog-like devotion and 
 despair.
 
 104 THE APPLES OF SIN, 
 
 I saw some such change coming over her 
 then, and, fearful lest it might tempt her to for- 
 get her threat, I answered her with the taunt 
 which I knew would madden her most. 
 
 " Go back to the man you left, and to your 
 dishonoured children, and try to frighten them 
 with your tragedy-queen airs and threats of 
 suicide, for I have done with you once and 
 for ever." 
 
 " My God ! " she [cried, reeling as from a 
 blow, and white to the lips. " My God ! and it 
 is for this that I have made myself what I am ! " 
 
 I have said that I was a murderer, and the 
 word which I spoke then (I will not set it down 
 here) stretched her dead at my feet, as truly 
 as if it had been I who pointed the weapon or 
 pulled the trigger. She fell without a word or 
 groan, the pistol still in her hand ; and I re- 
 member that I stood with bent head, looking 
 down upon] her in a horrified stupor, and won- 
 dering, in a curious childish way, how long those 
 thin wreaths of smoke would continue to curl
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 105 
 
 upward from the barrel mouth. But within a 
 moment after the deed was done, it appeared 
 something so hideously different from what it 
 had appeared a second before it was done, that 
 it seemed to me as if my whole world had 
 changed with the report of the pistol as if I 
 had passed from one self into another. The 
 new self stood, with the dead body at its feet, 
 by the brink of an ever-widening gulf, upon the 
 farther side of which now fast receding into 
 distance was set the old self which I had once 
 thought so guilty, but which, when compared 
 with the present self, shone out like innocence 
 beside infamy.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Afterwards. 
 
 NOW that the end, which I had with such 
 devilish deliberation sought to attain, was 
 indeed accomplished, it seemed to me a thing 
 so unnaturally and monstrously impossible, that 
 I was incapable of realizing it. 
 
 "She is dead," I said, as though I were tell- 
 ing it to some person slow of comprehension. 
 " She is dead, and I am her murderer ! " 
 
 So conscious was I of the fact that I was not 
 merely morally, but in every sense of the word, 
 guilty, that I felt it as necessary to conceal the 
 evidence of my crime, as if it had been my 
 hand which had actually shed her blood. I re- 
 membered too that I was known to have quar- 
 relled with her in the morning ; that it was in 
 my company she had last been seen ; that it 
 was by my pistol her life had been taken ; and 
 
 106
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 107 
 
 that if the body were found, and inquiries made, 
 nothing could save me from being convicted of 
 the murder. A panic seized me as I thought of 
 all this, a panic which paralyzed body and brain, 
 brought out a cold sweat upon hands and fore- 
 head, and set me trembling like a palsied man. 
 I looked around in an agony of fear, and as I 
 did so, my eyes fell upon a long narrow fissure 
 in the chalky hillside, a natural crevice formed 
 by the cracking of the earth in a former dry 
 season. I dared not lift the body, lest the blood 
 which was still welling from the wound, and 
 from which as the fierce rays of the summer sun 
 beat upon it, there rose a warm and insufferable 
 odour which turned me sick, should find its way 
 upon my hands or clothes, so I dragged the 
 corpse by the feet to the side of the natural 
 grave I had found, and then gently rolled it into 
 the aperture. It slid down until it stopped at 
 a bend where the fissure slanted away to the 
 right, but, by means of my walking stick, I man- 
 aged to force it round the angle where it was
 
 108 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 out of sight, and then, after filling up the fissure 
 with stones and rubble, and covering the blood 
 stains with earth I stood up to do what ? To 
 think ? No, that way madness lay ; that was 
 the one thing I dared not do ; the one thing of 
 all others I must at any cost avoid. I had mur- 
 der upon my conscience now, and, as the soul 
 which is once dyed black can take no darker 
 stain, I felt that there was no sin of act or 
 thought, no evil, no matter how foul, that I 
 would at that moment have hesitated to com- 
 mit, if only it would serve to save me from the 
 memory of what I had done. I, who in the past 
 had been refined and delicately fastidious even 
 in regard to my thoughts, now strove in a very 
 frenzy of fear to stimulate all that was low and 
 evil within me, in order that I might lash my- 
 self into a savage sensuality, which should 
 dominate body and brain, and save me from 
 thinking of what I had done. I knew that 
 Nemesis stalked like a shadow at my side, 
 pointing with one grisly hand to a scroll which
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 109 
 
 he held in the other, and I knew that on that 
 scroll the word "MURDERER" was inscribed in 
 letters of fire, and that in the moment when I 
 looked thereon, hell itself would lay hold on 
 me. 
 
 A sudden terror of solitude seized me, for 
 solitude meant something scarcely less terrible 
 than death. To be alone was to be at the 
 mercy of my thoughts of the thought which I 
 dared not think ; and hurrying as though a pack 
 of fiends were after me, I climbed the hill, and 
 passed down into the village.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Cavern. 
 
 A RRIVED at the hotel, I sent for the land- 
 /~\ lord, and told him that I would take 
 lunch at table d'hote, and not in my own room 
 as I had done on previous days. 
 
 "And madame?" he said, in a tone of defer- 
 ential inquiry. 
 
 "Madame," I answered, "has already re- 
 turned to Brussels. The business about which 
 she came to see me is finished, and she has gone 
 by diligence to the station," 
 
 I said this with perfect ease and self-posses- 
 sion, for I was calm with the indifference of de- 
 spair. We can scarce conceal our annoyance 
 at some petty slight, and over-do the indiffer- 
 ence we assume, but we never act more natur- 
 ally than when despair is eating at our hearts, 
 and we care not whether we be believed or not. 
 
 no
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. Ill 
 
 The hotel keeper bowed, being evidently 
 quite satisfied with my explanation, but lingered 
 to say that a party was being formed to visit the 
 famous subterranean caverns in the neighbur- 
 hood, and that if I cared to join, he would arrange 
 the matter for me. Anything which promised 
 companionship and an adventure was welcome, 
 and more than welcome, and I answered that 
 I should be delighted to avail myself of the 
 offer. 
 
 I have no recollection of what was said .at 
 lunch or during the drive to the caverns, for 1 I 
 had fallen into a strange daze or stupor, in which 
 I spoke and acted mechanically. The faces of 
 the folk at table d'hote appeared to recede 
 before my eyes, so that I seemed to be looking 
 at them down a vista, and their voices sounded 
 as if from a distance. But I talked well, and 
 even brilliantly, and I knew that I did so, as I 
 might have known it of another person. The 
 real self which had shrunk inward like a snail 
 within a shell,, where it lay hugging its guilty
 
 112 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 secret to its heart, away from its own sight and 
 the sight of others, looked out with wondering,, 
 watchful eyes at the smiling stranger, who bore 
 its name and likeness, and asked itself where 
 was the brain which animated the puppet, and 
 whence came the words which rose so readily 
 to its lips. 
 
 When we arrived at our destination, the 
 guide, after putting a lighted torch in the hand 
 of every third person, bade us follow carefully 
 in his footsteps, and we entered the caverns. 
 For the first few hundred yards he led us through 
 a series of pitch-dark grottoes where our way 
 wound in and out among fantastically-formed 
 stalactites and stalagmites that writhed like 
 huge reptiles around us, and then, after creep- 
 ing, bent double, through a slimy-walled tunnel 
 from the roof of which the percolating waters 
 dropped monotonously into little pools below, 
 we emerged into an enormous cavern-hall, lofty 
 as a vast cathedral. Though the guide hurled 
 flaming brands high into the air overhead, and
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 113 
 
 as far on either side as his strength would allow, 
 no glimpse of the cavern's limits was revealed, 
 nor could the combined light of all our torches 
 penetrate the unsearchable darkness which 
 brooded like a starless midnight around. A 
 fierce wind that was as icy-cold as if it blew from 
 the halls of death, swept shrieking like a flight 
 of fiends, over our heads, and as it died away 
 howling and rumbling in the womb of night, we 
 heard the rush and roar of waters beneath us. 
 Calling out that none was to move, the guide 
 tossed a lighted torch into the air. It fell a 
 yard or two in front of us, but instead of strik- 
 ing ground, as we had expected, rushed hissing 
 down an abyss which opened almost at our feet, 
 and at the bottom of which we saw surging 
 sullenly on, an ink-black river of death. And 
 around us writhed foul slimy things that stole 
 noiselessly away into the darkness ; and above 
 us circled clouds of bat-like creatures, uttering 
 unearthly cries of impotent anger. 
 
 And then, in an instant, a strange faintness 
 
 i
 
 114 THE APPLES OF SfA. 
 
 came over me. I saw the guide take up his 
 bundle of torches to resume the march, and 
 heard him bidding us walk warily and keep 
 together, but though I strove to cry out for 
 help, my parched lips gave forth no sound. In 
 a very paroxysm of terror, for I was, at that 
 moment, the last of the party, and being per- 
 sonally unknown to the others, was not likely 
 to be missed, I attempted to catch at the coat 
 of the man in front of me, but being giddy with 
 fear and faintness, I fell forward upon my face. 
 For one second the darkness which seemed 
 suddenly to become palpable, and the light of 
 the torches, swam round and round me in a 
 mad dance ; in another second the lights were 
 gone, and I saw only the darkness, which still 
 whirled on in spirals that came ever nearer and 
 nearer, as if a huge black boa-constrictor were 
 contracting his folds around me and then night 
 closed over me like a sea, and I knew no more.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Murder and Soul-Murder. 
 
 HOW long I lay thus I cannot say, but when 
 next I opened my eyes, I remembered 
 nothing, was conscious of nothing, save of a 
 death-cold numbness in body and limb. I asked 
 myself where I "was and looked around from 
 side to side in a sudden, inexplicable terror, but 
 though I strained my eyeballs till they cracked 
 in their sockets, I could not pierce the impene- 
 trable darkness which closed about me like a 
 cloak. I pnt out my hand to feel where I was 
 lying, and with the shudder which ran through 
 me as I touched the ice-cold and clammy ground, 
 the past rose up in a flash, and I knew that I 
 was alone, with murder most foul upon my soul, 
 alone, and in that awful abode of darkness and 
 death. 
 
 115
 
 116 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 But it was not the fear of death, nor the dark- 
 ness of the place, nor its loneliness, but my own 
 thoughts, which lent such supreme agony to 
 my awakening, and caused me to leap to my 
 feet with the cry of a hunted creature, and to 
 shriek out to God, in His mercy, to slay me. 
 For in that moment, the thoughts, to escape 
 from which I would have sought distraction in 
 the vilest sin, the thoughts which even in the 
 open air and the daylight, I dared not think, 
 gave tongue like hounds that sight the quarry 
 they had feared would escape them, and leapt 
 upon me a bloody pack as though to rend 
 my very soul. A whole aeon of hell-torture 
 was concentrated into every minute that passed. 
 It seemed impossible that I could endure such 
 anguish, and live ; as if mental pain must kill 
 as surely as physical. 
 
 But when the death which I had half-hoped 
 for came not, I dropped, huddled in a heap to 
 the ground, and, clutching my throat with both 
 hands, strove to throttle the life out of me, and
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 117 
 
 well-nigh succeeded, had not a terrible physical 
 faintness which forced my nerveless fingers to 
 loosen and relax, left me choking and gasping 
 for breath, with eyes starting from their sockets, 
 and lolling tongue adrip. 
 
 For a long time I lay thus, helpless and half- 
 dead in body, but with brain abnormally active 
 and alive. Thoughts came and went con- 
 tinually now racing by like bridleless horses 
 now seething and surging in the maelstrom of 
 my mind, like waters in a whirlpool. Remorse 
 awful beyond conception for the woman I had 
 murdered had sinned only in loving me too well 
 and which was more terrible than any phy- 
 sical pain, racked me with an agony which be- 
 came every minute more unendurable. And 
 then a strange thing happened to me, for an 
 unconscious habit of thought brought about a 
 self-revelation in which I read my own heart as 
 I had never read it before, and I saw something 
 there which added immeasurably to the supreme 
 agony of that moment. I had never made any
 
 118 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 pretence of entertaining a grand passion for the 
 woman with whom I had sinned. The passion 
 was all on her side, and my part had been more 
 passive than active. But cut off and disowned, 
 as both of us had been, by our relatives, we had 
 naturally come to depend a great deal upon 
 each other, and for some months it had been 
 my habit to come to her for sympathy in all my 
 troubles. The child-instinct which taught us, 
 in all our sorrows to nestle up for shelter into 
 the warm darkness, the soft, sweet-smelling 
 silence of a woman's bosom, never dies out in 
 us ; and the man for whom, though all else be 
 lost, there yet throbs one faithful woman-heart 
 upon which he may pillow his head, is not 
 all to be pitied, for to him there remains the 
 divinest comfort which any human creature 
 may know. 
 
 So accustomed was I to look to her for con- 
 solation in all my troubles, that even in this aw- 
 ful hour, an unconscious habit of thought set 
 stirring in my momentarily benumbed brain the
 
 THE APPLES OF SIN. 119 
 
 idea, that in her sympathy, at least, I should 
 find some lightening of my agony. Bu,t in the 
 next instant I remembered that the agony from 
 which I thus sought to find surcease, was re- 
 morse for her most foul murder, and I laughed 
 a laugh which was more awful than any cry. 
 
 And in that moment of self-revelation I read 
 my heart as I had never read it before, and I 
 knew that the woman of whom I fancied my- 
 self weary, was the one and ' only being in the 
 world who was more necessary to me than the 
 air I breathed that I had grown to love her 
 with an intensity of which I could not have be- 
 lieved my selfish nature capable. 
 
 With a great cry of infinite love and longing 
 I sprang to my feet, stretching out my arms to 
 the empty darkness, as though the very inten- 
 sity of my passion must compel her bodily pres- 
 ence. Her face rose before me, imploring and 
 beseeching as I had so often seen it in the past. 
 Her timid touch was on my arm again ; her 
 tear-filled eyes looked into mine ; and I heard
 
 120 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 her tremulous voice, pleading piteously as I 
 had heard it plead on the very day of her death, 
 for the tender words which I had refused to 
 speak. I knew, in that moment that my love 
 for her was so great that were I under the open 
 sky again, and in possession of all that made 
 life sweet, I should have loathed the very sun- 
 shine which warmed a world in which she was 
 not. I loved her so truly that life without her 
 were to me more lonely and desolate than death 
 would be to the Christian without his God. It 
 was at my heart that the weapon which shed her 
 blood had been pointed ; it was my happiness, 
 here and hereafter, as well as her life, which I 
 had slain. I knew then that I had murdered 
 the soul and killed the body of the woman I 
 loved the woman who should have been more 
 sacred to me than all which is on earth or in 
 heaven. 
 
 "Hear me, O God ! " I cried, " and visit the 
 sin 'not upon her, but upon me ! Spare me 
 that hell at least ! the hell of knowing that
 
 ; THE APPLES OF SIN. 121 
 
 Thou gavest an immortal soul into my keeping, 
 and that I flung it back to Thee stained and 
 shamed and lost to all eternity ! Spare me 
 that, for Thy Christ's sake, and upon my head 
 be it visited, O God ! if Thou art, indeed, a 
 God of Justice, and not upon hers ! " 
 
 " But she is not dead ! I cannot believe it ! I 
 will not. She could not go she who loved me 
 so -well where the sound of my voice would 
 not recall her ! She is mine, and I am hers, 
 and we must be together in hell, if need must 
 be, but always together, O God ! she and I." 
 
 Does God hear and heed the supplications 
 of His creatures ? I think so, and God help 
 the sinner whom God_derides by the satire of 
 an answered prayer ! 
 
 For one moment the intensity my anguish 
 caused my heart, strained well-nigh unto burst- 
 ing, to fail me, and I staggered forward a step 
 or two, but my nerveless limbs gave way be- 
 neath me, and I sank to the ground, fainting 
 and fighting for breath. But as I lay, a name-
 
 122 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 less horror seized me, a horror of something 
 which lay beside me, a something which I had 
 neither touched nor seen, but of which every 
 fibre of my body was conscious, and which 
 caused my very flesh to creep on my bones, as 
 it shrank back, shuddering from fear of contact. 
 In one second I had drawn a box of matches 
 from my pocket, and had struck a light, and 
 then there rang out a shriek more awful than 
 hell has ever known, for that something which 
 lay beside me was the body of the woman I had 
 murdered, and which the waters had washed 
 down from the crevice in which I had placed it, 
 and carried to my feet in answer to my prayer.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 My Atonement. 
 
 <4\/OU have been ill, Monsieur," said the 
 1 landlord of the hotel, when, on open- 
 ing my eyes, and finding myself lying on the 
 bed which I had previously occupied, I asked 
 him what had happened. 
 
 "How long? and who is that?" I inquired, 
 pointing to a man in uniform, who stood near 
 the window. 
 
 " That, Monsieur, is a police officer, and you 
 have been ill three weeks, and no wonder ! You 
 were found in the cavern with Madame. 
 Madame was dead, and well the officer is 
 waiting for you to explain." 
 
 " Call the man here," I answered, but he was 
 already beside me. 
 
 " My good sir," he said, not unkindly, "there 
 is really no need for anxiety. The doctors are 
 
 123
 
 124 THE APPLES OF SIN. 
 
 all of opinion from the direction of the shot 
 that it was a case of suicide, but the circum- 
 stances are unpleasant, and well, you will have 
 to explain them." 
 
 " I can explain them," I replied. 
 
 "Of course you can, of course you can," he 
 said, "but don't let us talk about it now, for 
 anything you say will be taken down, and 
 might be used against you." 
 
 "It will not matter, in view of what I have to 
 say," I answered, " for the woman you found 
 was murdered, and I am her murderer."
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 
 A STUDY IN VANITY AND DIPSOMANIA. 
 
 "And sometimes we are devils to ourselves, 
 When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, 
 Presuming on their changeful potency." 
 
 TROILVS AND CKESSIDA, Act iv, Sc. iv.
 
 W 
 1 
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 En route to the dinner My first warning. 
 
 OU tell me, Frank," he said, "that your 
 circumstances your being a bachelor, 
 and so on are against your leading as temperate 
 a life as you wish to lead ; but ' circumstances,' 
 my dear boy, never yet made the man do 
 right who didn't do right in spite of them. It's 
 quite true that I've never known you the worse 
 for drink, but I can't help noticing that the habit 
 of indulgence has been growing on you some- 
 what lately, and though I have no doubt you 
 mean what you say when you tell me you intend 
 to be very careful about everything of the sort 
 when you are married, I should like to see you 
 make the change beforehand, if my Alice is to 
 be your wife." 
 
 127
 
 128 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 "My dear Colonel Frazer," I said, lightly, 
 "you need not have the slightest anxiety upon 
 that score. If it were a new thing for me to 
 take a little stimulant now and then, it would be 
 a different matter, but I've been used to drink- 
 ing in moderation for years, and I know just 
 when to begin and when to leave off." 
 
 " I'm sorry to be disagreeable, Frank," he 
 persisted, " but you know as well as I do what 
 it was spoilt your father's life ; and when there 
 is a chance of a man having the thing in his 
 blood, the best course he can pursue is not to 
 drink at all. I quite agree with what you said 
 just now about the intemperate advocates of a 
 cause doing it more harm than its enemies ; but 
 when we are dealing with a thing so accursed 
 that it can make men spend their money in 
 public-houses while their wives and children are 
 starving at home or in the streets when I read 
 in the papers of the murders and worse-than- 
 bestial outrages which, almost every day, are 
 committed under the influence of drink, I tell
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 129 
 
 you, sir, that, man of the world and old soldier 
 as I am, I can sympathize with the veriest tee- 
 total ranter that ever thumped a tub. And as 
 for what you said about ' temperance fanatics ' 
 and the 'folly of extreme measures,' I think 
 you might just as reasonably complain of the 
 fanaticism of the sanitary authorities in taking 
 ' extreme measures ' to keep the cholera out of 
 England and drink kills more men, and 
 women too, I am afraid, in this country, each 
 year than the cholera does in a century. No, 
 Frank, my boy ; you're a good fellow and I like 
 you ; but there's no doubt that the habit has 
 been growing on you lately, and when I remem- 
 ber your father, I must stick to my point, if 
 you're to marry my girl. Come, give me your 
 promise that you'll turn the thing up altogether, 
 and let's drop the subject." 
 
 "Promises and pledges are for weak-minded 
 fools who have no will of their own," I answered 
 hotly, being annoyed at his persistence; "I'm 
 
 not one of that sort, and I know what I'm about. 
 
 . K
 
 130 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 I've never given you. cause to speak to me as 
 you have to-night, and I must say that I consider 
 your remarks almost insulting. But excuse 
 me, here we are at Sir Frederick's, and as his 
 dinner-hour is seven, we have no time to spare 
 for further unprofitable discussions."
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 At Sir Frederick's I lose my head, and make my first slip. 
 
 MV seat at dinner was, I discovered to my 
 annoyance, exactly opposite to that of 
 Colonel Frazer, my future father-in-law and 
 would-be mentor. I was already flushed and 
 heated by his remarks ; and it did not mend 
 matters when I found, or fancied that I found, 
 he was narrowly watching what I drank ; and 
 as I was determined to show him that I was not 
 to be bullied or dictated to, I took wine with 
 each course more freely than was my custom. 
 Under other circumstances, and in my usually 
 collected condition, this would have been fol- 
 lowed by no perceptible result ; but Colonel 
 Frazer's insulting remarks and subsequent 
 offensive behaviour had brought about such a 
 state of brain and nerve irritation, that the 
 wine affected me almost immediately, and by 
 
 131
 
 132 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 the time two or three courses had been gone 
 through, I scarcely knew what I was about. 
 Up to this point, I had said or done nothing to 
 attract attention ; but as time went on, I found 
 myself almost monopolising the conversation ; 
 and as the more I talked, the more excited I 
 became, I am afraid that long before dinner 
 was over my remarks had become not only in- 
 considered, but inconsiderate. I had not, how- 
 ever, so lost my head as to be altogether 
 unconscious of the fact that some of the guests 
 were beginning to look at me curiously, and to 
 exchange meaning glances among themselves. 
 My wisest plan would have been to withraw at 
 once from the conversation, and to remain 
 comparatively silent for the rest of the evening, 
 but I was too flushed and excited to have the 
 complete control over myself which was neces- 
 sary for such a course. At last, and in order 
 to cover a remark which, directly I had said it, 
 I felt was both wild and foolish, I broke into 
 and interrupted a conversation which was being
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 133 
 
 carried on between Sir Frederick and one of 
 his guests. The slightest possible lifting of 
 our host's eyebrows, as he turned courteously 
 to accord me his attention, told me of what I 
 was next moment aware that the interruption 
 was in anything but good taste; and this, in 
 conjunction with a cup of strong coffee, had 
 some effect in recalling me to myself. But 
 when, pleading a headache, I took an early 
 leave, I carried with me the mortifying con- 
 sciousness that I had, for the first time in my 
 life, been betrayed into drinking more wine 
 than was consistent with the self-possession 
 and self-restraint which are the first essentials 
 of all well-bred intercourse, and that I had thus 
 been guilty of one of the most unpardonable 
 forms of social suicide.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 I make self excuses and good resolutions. 
 
 HOW natural it is, says an American humor- 
 ist, for a man who has made a fool of 
 himself to ease his mind by cursing somebody 
 else for it. When I awoke on the morning 
 following the dinner at Sir Frederick Deane's 
 and recollected with intense mortification what 
 had happened the night before, it was against 
 Colonel Frazer, rather than against myself, 
 that my indignation was directed. I was the 
 more convinced that it was at his door, and not 
 mine, that the fault lay, from the fact that, so 
 far from ever having been guilty of a similar 
 offence in the past, I had, on the contrary, 
 achieved something of a reputation for irre- 
 proachable bearing, and was regarded, even in 
 the most fastidious "set," as a man whom it 
 
 134
 
 A LITERARY GENT, 135 
 
 was particularly safe to ask anywhere, or to 
 meet any one. 
 
 But for Colonel Frazer's ill-timed and im- 
 pertinent remark, I should have been, I told 
 myself, as collected and self-possessed as was 
 my wont ; and but for his particularly offensive 
 conduct in watching what wine I took, I should 
 never have been betrayed into any excess. For 
 what had happened, he and only he, was ac- 
 countable ; and the more assured I became of 
 this fact the less inclined was I to under-esti- 
 mate the heinousness of the offence. Had any 
 one but the father of the woman I loved been 
 guilty of such ungentlemanly behaviour, I 
 would have declined to have anything further 
 to do with him. As it was, I determined that 
 if when I called to see Alice that night Colonel 
 Frazer referred in any way to the events of the 
 preceding evening, I would give him clearly to 
 understand what my views were upon the sub- 
 ject. When I arrived at the house, however, I 
 heard that he had been summoned out of town
 
 136 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 on urgent business, and was not likely to return 
 for some weeks. But I saw and spent the 
 evening with Alice, who, though she was, as I 
 now know, aware of what had happened, never 
 alluded to it by look or word, When I bade 
 her " good-night," and returned to my chambers, 
 I was more in love with her than I had ever 
 been, and shall I say it ? not a little ashamed 
 of myself, and full of good resolutions for the 
 future.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 My first book I awake to find myself famous and get a bad attack of 
 "swelled head." 
 
 COLONEL FRAZER did not treat me 
 very cordially when he returned, but 
 he refrained from any allusion to what had 
 happened, or from again favouring me with 
 his views upon the total abstinence ques- 
 tion. Though I had not forgotten the in- 
 cident at Sir Frederick Deane's, I knew myself 
 too well to fear any repetition of the mistake 
 I had made on that occasion ; and the months 
 as they went by fully justified my confidence in 
 myself. At last the time approached when I 
 felt I might reasonably ask Alice to fix the date 
 of our marriage, which was finally settled for 
 the following spring. This was in the autumn, 
 and it was almost immediately afterwards that 
 my first book was published. The success of 
 
 137
 
 138 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 the volume which was on Social Reform was 
 immense and immediate ; and I might almost 
 say that I went to bed one night a nobody, and 
 awoke in the morning to find my book a 
 "boom," and my personality an object of 
 public interest. 
 
 The suddenness and unexpectedness of the 
 notoriety I had achieved had the not uncom- 
 mon effect of turning my head completely. 
 Great as was the stir which the book had made, 
 this stir assumed such exaggerated propor- 
 tions in my eyes, that it seemed to me as if 
 the nation not to say the world instead of 
 that microscopical minority of the population 
 which is known as the " reading public," was 
 concerning itself about me. I walked, or rather 
 swaggered the streets, puffed up with pride and 
 self-sufficiency, as I told myself that I the 
 being inside this suit of clothes and wearing 
 this identical hat was the Frank Russell about 
 whom everyone was talking, and whose portrait 
 was in all the papers, If anything be needed
 
 A LITERARY GENT, 139 
 
 to prove how unsubstantial was the basis upon 
 which the fabric of my fame was erected, I 
 think it is to be found in the fact that I was 
 thus spoilt by success. The man who, con- 
 scious of great abilities, toils patiently on un- 
 recognised and unknown, until at last, by sheer 
 force of intellect or of character, he collars the 
 great world as a policeman collars a prisoner, 
 and assisting the gaping creature, by means of 
 a fist fixed in the scruff of the neck, up to the 
 book or picture it has persistently neglected, 
 says: " There, you fool ! Look as that! It's 
 been staring you in the face long enough ! " 
 that man is rarely spoiled by success, be it slow 
 or sudden, when it comes. If the smile with 
 which he hears the public gushing as persist- 
 ently about his work, as it had in the past persist- 
 ently ignored it, is a smile of gratification, the 
 gratification is not altogether umixed with 
 cynicism or contempt. And so far from being 
 inclined to give himself airs or to lose his head, 
 he is not a little shamefaced that so much has
 
 140 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 been made of so little ; and is inclined, in his 
 less hopeful moments, to ask himself whether 
 work which has been so indiscriminately praised- 
 is not more shoddy and less sterling than he 
 had believed it to be. 
 
 No such mistrust of myself or of my abilities 
 ever troubled my peace of mind, and I regarded 
 my "fame" (the word means in these nine- 
 teenth century days, as Mr. Oscar Wilde once 
 wittily said, "being talked about in the penny 
 and halfpenny newspapers ") as seriously as if 
 the verdict of the press of the day had al- 
 ready been endorsed by posterity. The 
 amount of money I managed to spend in periodi- 
 cal literature at that time was marvellous ; and 
 I invested the various journals with a sort of 
 personality, in accordance with the views they 
 took in regard to my book, or the amount of 
 space they devoted to paragraphs about myself. 
 But so far from being grateful to the men who 
 had done most to exploit me, I felt when, as 
 afterwards happened, the interest in my book
 
 A LITERARY GENT, 141 
 
 subsided and a scandal in high life succeeding 
 to the first place in public attention my name 
 began to drop out of the papers, that these 
 same men had treated me exceedingly ill. 
 Jealousy had prompted them, I declared, to 
 enter into a conspiracy to crush me ; and I was 
 more malignantly inclined towards them than I 
 was towards the journalists who had never 
 noticed me at all. 
 
 But, during the time of which I am now writ- 
 ing, the "boom" was in full swing, and my 
 vanity seemed to grow by what it fed on, and 
 to become each day more and more insatiable. 
 Flattery could not be fulsome enough for my 
 voracious maw, and I know now that at one 
 of the literary and artistic clubs I frequented, 
 "trailing" me was a frequent pastime among 
 the members. Except for the fact that most of 
 us like to be on intimate terms with a "lion," 
 I think my many acquaintances must have sick- 
 ened at the sight of me during those weeks. 
 As the bee flits from flower to flower to drain
 
 142 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 the honey, so I went from friend to friend, 
 greedily drinking to the dregs the cups of flat- 
 tery which were offered me, and making my 
 house-to-house visitations with all the persist- 
 ency of a tax-gatherer. Chance acquaintances, 
 whom I had lost sight of for years, I now looked 
 up as anxiously as if I hoped to borrow money 
 from them. Each one of them represented 
 to me an as-yet unreaped harvest-field of flat- 
 tery ; and the arrogance with which I treated 
 those who did not appear to be sufficiently 
 impresssd with a due sense of my new import- 
 ance was only equalled by the insufferable 
 patronage which I graciously extended to those 
 who seemed to have formed a proper estimate 
 of my merits.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The " boom " progresses, and I become a man of much importance. 
 
 ONE morning, a few weeks after the pub- 
 lication of my book, and when the 
 " boom " was at its height, I took up The Times, 
 and having ascertained that it contained no 
 "reviews," commenced turning the pages of 
 general news with a somewhat languid and ex- 
 hausted interest. Suddenly I gave a start, and 
 clutching excitedly at the paper, sat bolt upright 
 in my chair, flushed to the forehead, and with 
 staring eyes, that had scarcely looked at one 
 line, before they had snatched the sense of the 
 next, and leaping on to the following one, had 
 raced, lightning-like, down the columns two 
 of which bristled with my name. A prominent 
 member of the House of Commons had so the 
 paper told me asked the Home Secretary if 
 his attention had been called to some appalling 
 
 143
 
 144 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 statistics given in a volume (mentioning my 
 book by name) which dealt with certain social 
 questions of the highest importance to public 
 morality, and if so, whether Her Majesty's Gov- 
 ernment proposed taking any steps in the 
 matter. An evasive and unsatisfactory reply 
 had called forth a storm of dissent, and resulted 
 in something like a scene in the House, and as 
 a consequence the papers were full of me and 
 my book. I had hardly finished the report of 
 the speeches before a telegram was brought me 
 by the maid-servant, and on opening it, I found 
 it was from the editor of , the most import- 
 ant and influential of all the monthly reviews, 
 asking me to write a paper on social reform for 
 his next number. He offered me an unusually 
 handsome fee, but said that as the month was 
 already far gone, he had to go to press in a 
 couple of days, and could give me only till the 
 following night to send in my copy. His tele- 
 gram concluded with the words : " Next month 
 too late."
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 145 
 
 I decided instantly to accept his offer. The 
 time was certainly very short, but no prepara- 
 tion would be necessary, as my mind was full 
 of the subject, and even if my paper lacked 
 finish, it would certainly be the stronger for 
 being written at white heat. Next month, 
 as the editor rightly said, would be too late. 
 Public attention is notoriously fickle, and before 
 then, some royal or eminent personage might 
 die or get into the Divorce Courts, or some- 
 thing else happen to distract people's minds. 
 In five minutes after my reply was despatched, 
 I was hard at work. I worked all that day, and 
 the greater part of the night. My excitement 
 was so intense that I was quite unable to take 
 solid food, and except a little whisky-and-water 
 which I sipped when I found myself beginning 
 to flag, nothing passed my lips until the paper 
 was done, which was on the afternoon of the 
 following day. That article was the high-water 
 mark of my literary achievements. In it I sur- 
 passed and surprised myself beyond my most 
 
 sanguine hopes. Something outside myself 
 
 L
 
 146 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 seemed to animate and to inspire me. The 
 red-hot thoughts, to which I gave utterance, the 
 noble and eloquent language in which I ex- 
 pressed them, were not mine. Such thoughts 
 and such language had never been at my com- 
 mand in the past ; they have never been at my 
 command since. 
 
 I remember that when I was young, impres- 
 sionable and a hero-worshipper, and had high 
 ideals about life and especially about authorship, 
 I used to believe with George Eliot that all our 
 noblest thoughts are given to us that they 
 come from some source outside ourselves, and 
 are, in a measure, an inspiration. But after a 
 time it occurred to me that if this be true of 
 what is great in literature, it must be true, to 
 some extent, of passages in, for instance, Byron, 
 which though unquestionably finer than any- 
 thing to be found in the works of many 
 authors to whom George Eliot's theory about 
 inspiration would apply, are hardly the kind of 
 thing of which one would use the term ''in- 
 spired."
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 147 
 
 And when I recollected that I had heard in 
 my boyhood one of the most eminent and elo- 
 quent preachers of the day (a man who was 
 frequently spoken of as "inspired") tell my 
 father that he had, on a particular occasion, sat 
 down with the express intention of writing a 
 moving sermon, but that there had come into 
 his head instead, whence he could not tell, a 
 screamingly-funny idea for a farcical story, I 
 could not help saying to myself: "If this man's 
 sermons be attributable, as he says, to some- 
 thing outside himself, and were 'given him,' 
 was not the farcical story seeing that it was 
 not there before derived from the same 
 source ? " 
 
 After that I gave up thinking about the sub- 
 ject of present day " inspiration," and the 
 knowledge that the source of inspiration of the 
 one and only "inspired" work I ever did was, 
 like the best work of other men infinitely greater 
 than I, whisky, has not encouraged me to 
 re-open the question.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 A Disgraceful Incident. 
 
 AS soon as I had finished the article I took 
 it to the editor, and waited while he read 
 the MS. He was delighted with it, assuring 
 me that it was bound to score immensely ; and 
 when I left his office my brain was what with 
 want of sleep, whisky, and gratified vanity in 
 a whirl. My wisest plan would have been to 
 go home and to bed, but I was engaged to dine 
 at Colonel Frazer's that evening, and did not 
 feel inclined to forego the triumph and lionizing 
 to which I considered myself entitled. Recent 
 events, too, had made me feel that, much as I 
 loved his daughter, I was doing him and his 
 family an honour in wishing to become his son- 
 in-law ; and that it was time he should be made 
 to realize this. As a matter of fact his name 
 had recalled an incident to my mind, the recol- 
 
 148
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 149 
 
 lection of which had rudely dispelled the pleas- 
 ant thoughts which the flattery I had received 
 had awakened. I had almost forgotten that he 
 had once ventured to lecture me me, about 
 whom every one was now talking, and who was 
 welcomed as an honoured guest in some of the 
 best houses in London, as though I had been 
 a badly-behaved schoolboy ; but as, in my ex- 
 cited state of mind, I recalled the circumstances, 
 my vanity took fire afresh, and what was in 
 reality a closed incident, assumed the appear- 
 ance of a recent insult. My brain was already 
 inflamed with whisky and egotism ; and as the 
 more I brooded over the matter, the more in- 
 dignant I became, I worked myself at last to 
 such a pitch of excitement that when I went 
 home to dress for dinner, I had to nerve myself 
 with neat brandy before my hand was steady 
 enough for me to shave myself. As a rule I 
 rarely touched brandy, but I felt on this occa- 
 sion that in view of the mental strain to which 
 I had been subjected during the twenty-four
 
 150 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 hours which had just passed, something in the 
 way of stimulant was absolutely necessary. Of 
 what happened on that eventful evening, and 
 at the dinner at Colonel Frazer's, I have very 
 little recollection. I have been told since that 
 the tone I adopted to my host and his guests 
 was either insolently arrogant or even more in- 
 solently patronizing. I can recall Colonel 
 Frazer's putting forward some theory, which, 
 though he was not addressing me at the time, 
 I violently attacked ; and I remember that, 
 galled by his contemptuous withdrawal from the 
 conversation, and by the meaning looks which, 
 rightly or wrongly, I fancied he was bending in 
 my direction, I insulted him openly and grossly. 
 I can just recall the moment of pained sur- 
 prise and silence it partly sobered me which 
 followed, and remember hearing some snatches 
 of a courteous explanation, "young man of 
 great ability," " most excitable brain," "fear he 
 has been working too hard," which our host was 
 making to his guests. My next recollection is
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 151 
 
 that of standing in the open air, without a hat, 
 and holding on to the arm of a friend and 
 neighbour of mine who sat near me at dinner ; 
 a hansom drove up ; we got in ; and I remem- 
 ber no more.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 " Next Morning " I renounce the accursed cause of my misery. 
 
 THERE is no mercy in the calm, cold eyes 
 of Memory, as she stands by our bedside 
 on the inevitable " next morning," waiting and 
 watching for our waking, that she may show us 
 our follies of the night before, as they look in 
 the white and searching light of day. We have 
 turned a page in the ledger of our lives, and 
 the new day's leaf lies white and fair before us, 
 but there is a tiny pencilled line at the top ot 
 the page which tells of the fatal figures which 
 we have " carried over " from the entries of the 
 preceding day, and after one glance at that, the 
 bright, white, unsullied beauty of the morning 
 is bright and beautiful for us no more. I re- 
 member that on the day following the scene at 
 Colonel Frazer's I was conscious, almost before 
 I was awake, of a sense of imminent evil and 
 
 152
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 153 
 
 shame which lay upon my heart like lead ; and 
 I had hardly opened my eyes before Memory 
 had taken me by the throat, and was looking 
 me in the face with pitiless and basilisk eyes, 
 from which there was no escape. I need not 
 here describe how bitterly I cursed my folly ; 
 how I writhed and rocked, as if in bodily pain, 
 and in a very agony of unavailing remorse, as 
 I re-acted in imagination the shameful scene, 
 and pictured to myself the disgust which my 
 conduct must have aroused in the minds of all 
 present. That I, I of all men in the world, 
 should have drunk myself, like a pothouse sot, 
 into such a state of bestiality as to be capable 
 of grossly insulting a friend at his own table, 
 and that friend my future father-in-law, seemed 
 to me so monstrously and preposterously in- 
 credible that I could scarcely believe the events 
 of the preceding night were other than a hid- 
 eous nightmare. 
 
 Upon one course, I was at least, decided 
 that I would at once and forever renounce the
 
 154 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 accursed thing which was the cause of my mis- 
 ery ; and, hastily dressing, I sat down and wrote 
 a note to Colonel Frazer, telling him of my 
 shame and humiliation, and offering him the 
 most ample and unconditional apology. Though 
 I could not, I told him, ever forgive myself, I 
 implored him for the sake of the love I bore his 
 daughter, which I knew he was aware was sin- 
 cere, to accept my solemn promise never to 
 touch stimulants more. 
 
 His reply was generous and manly. If what 
 had happened, he said, should be the means of 
 showing me the danger in which I stood; he for 
 one, would never regret it. He accepted my 
 apology unreservedly, and if, after a month's 
 time, I could come to him and tell him that my 
 promise had been kept, he would allow me to 
 resume my old footing in his family. He en- 
 closed a short letter from Alice, in which, ex- 
 cept for the fact that she said she had promised 
 her father not to see me or communicate with 
 me for a month, there was no allusion to what
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 155 
 
 had happened, or word of reproach. The let- 
 ter was as loving, tender, and gentle as ever, 
 and concluded with an assurance of love and 
 faith, and of the joyfulness with which she was 
 looking forward to the day of our meeting.
 
 CHAPTFR VIII. 
 
 In the toils A terrible temptation." 
 
 THE day passed by, and though I felt low 
 and despondent, and in need, if only for 
 medicinal reasons, of something in the nature 
 of a stimulant, I touched nothing of the sort 
 either at dinner or at lunch. In the evening I 
 settled down to work at an article with which 
 
 the editor of the had proposed I should 
 
 follow up the paper which was making such a 
 stir in his current number ; but midnight found 
 me no nearer the accomplishment of my task 
 than when I began. Try as I would, my slug- 
 gish brain refused to formulate my thoughts in 
 fitting words, and when at last the few ideas I 
 had upon the subject were brought to birth, 
 they had been so turned over and tumbled in 
 the travail of my brain, that they had lost all 
 freshness, and were, from the literary point of 
 
 156
 
 A LITERARY GENT, 157 
 
 view, almost worthless. All this while I had 
 been conscious of an intense craving for stimu- 
 lant, and I began to recognize for the first time 
 and with uneasiness which was akin to fear, how 
 necessary the use of wine and spirit had become 
 to me. That the sudden and total cessation of 
 a habit to which I had accustomed myself for 
 years would require an effort on my part, and 
 would leave me restless and unsettled, I had 
 fully expected, but I could not have believed 
 that the hold the thing had upon me was so fast. 
 I felt, however, that I had reason to be thankful 
 I had made the discovery thus early ; and now 
 that I fully recognized the danger in which I 
 stood, I determined to shake myself free, once 
 and for all, from everything in the shape of 
 drink. I passed a restless night, and awoke 
 next morning feeling nervous and depressed, 
 but strong in my resolution. Hoping to make 
 up by redoubled exertion for the profitless 
 labour of the night before, I settled down to 
 my work immediately after breakfast ; but
 
 158 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 though I tried to stimulate my brain by strong 
 tea and coffee, in place of whiskey, what I 
 wrote was so flabby and feeble that, when I 
 read it over to myself in the afternoon, I thrust 
 it impatiently into the fire. 
 
 The experience of the next day, and of the 
 four days following it, were of a similar nature, 
 and, to add to my dismay, I discovered that the 
 craving for drink, instead of decreasing as time 
 went on, was becoming stronger and more con- 
 tinuous. I found, too, that this craving was at 
 no time so imperious as when I attempted to 
 work. Just as surely as I took up a pen and 
 sat waiting, with all my attention turned inward, 
 to see what thought-pictures the magic lantern 
 of my brain would cast upon the white disc ol 
 consciousness, just as surely would the longing 
 for the forbidden thing rise within me now 
 stealing over my senses like a subtle odour, 
 soothing them to a soft deliciousness which 
 wooed them to surrender, now enticing them 
 by memories of past revelries, and always be-
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 159 
 
 coming more and more irresistible. Whether 
 it was that the mutinous body, ever at war with 
 the restrictions placed upon it by the spirit, saw 
 in these unguarded moments of inaction an 
 opportunity to break out into open revolt ; or 
 whether the attempt to stimulate the brain in- 
 duced a proportionate stimulus of the senses, 
 I cannot say, but the facts are as I have stated. 
 Nor were signs wanting to show that my moral 
 garrison was less loyal than I had supposed. 
 "If you are really sincere in your wish to free 
 yourself from the thing that has you in its 
 power," whispered a voice within me, "are you 
 sure you are going the right way to work? 
 Would it not be wiser to break off the habit 
 gradually reducing your allowance day by day, 
 until it reaches vanishing point ? Then your 
 victory will be final and complete, for you will 
 have conquered yourself, and killed, not merely 
 put to flight, the enemy whom you have let 
 into your citadel. And are you sure that you 
 have sufficient strength of purpose to stand the
 
 160 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 terrible strain you are placing upon yourself 
 and you must remember, before answering, 
 that one failure now would be fatal ? " 
 
 Again and again such thoughts as these re- 
 curred to me, until the confidence and courage 
 with which, in the first flush of my resolution, I 
 had regarded the struggle before me, began to 
 ooze away, and I became not only anxious but 
 terrified. The knowledge that seven days out 
 of the ten in which I had promised to complete 
 my paper had passed, without my having written 
 anything to which I could put my signature, 
 added immeasurably to my dismay ; for, next 
 to my love for Alice, nothing lay so near my 
 heart as my work. 
 
 The eighth day found me no further advanced 
 than before, and now my misery amounted 
 almost to madness, for it seemed to me as if 
 ruin and disgrace were on every side staring 
 me in the face. To have resource to stimulant 
 again would not only necessitate the breaking 
 of my solemn promise to Colonel Frazer, and
 
 A LITERARY GENT 161 
 
 the consequent loss of Alice, but, in view of 
 the terrible hold which drink already had upon 
 me, would mean mental and moral suicide. 
 And yet I could no longer disguise the fact 
 that the many years during which I had accus- 
 tomed myself to working upon whisky had 
 rendered me so dependent upon the aid of 
 stimulant, that without something of the sort, I 
 was absolutely incapable of doing the work upon 
 which I depended for my livelihood. The thing 
 which had been my slave had now become my 
 master, and had me at its mercy. I was like a 
 man, who, having found a pretty, purring, soft- 
 furred creature in a forest, carries it to his home, 
 where he fondles and feeds it, teaching it to 
 come and go at his call, until one night he 
 awakens to feel a tiger's fangs at his throat, 
 and his life-blood draining away beneath its 
 cruel clutching claws. 
 
 In my misery and despair, I did what I had 
 not done since I was a child fell on my knees 
 and prayed. " Help me, O God ! " I cried, " if 
 
 M
 
 162 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 Thou art, indeed, the God of the helpless. 
 Thou knowest my love for Alice. Thou 
 knowest my love for my work, and Thou seest 
 the temptations wherewith I am surrounnded. 
 I must be true to her, and true to my better, 
 my best, self. Help me, then, to do my work, 
 and help me to fight against the foul thing which 
 seeks to destroy me ; and give me the victory, 
 Amen." 
 
 Somewhat comforted in a vague way, I rose 
 and tried to settle to my work, but the unwonted 
 act of prayer had recalled old memories of the 
 mother I had lost in my childhood. She was a 
 Catholic, and had taught me, as a little lad, to 
 cross myself at the words, " And deliver us 
 from evil," in the Lord!s Prayer, telling me of : 
 the terror with which this sign was regarded by * 
 the powers of darkness how Satan was re- 
 corded to have fled screaming at the sight of it, 
 and how witchcraft and sorcery had, by the 
 same holy symbol, made in the Name of the 
 Trinity, been brought to nought. As all this
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 163 
 
 was corroborated by a mediaeval romance I had 
 once read and been much interested in, it had 
 greatly impressed me, and I had for years fol- 
 lowed the habit my mother had taught me, of 
 making the sign of the Cross when in the pres- 
 ence of death or danger, or when tempted to 
 do anything wrong. The reader will, perhaps, 
 smile when I tell him that in the utter misery 
 and despair of my struggle against the terrible 
 temptations which beset me, this old, almost 
 forgotten habit of my childhood recurred to me. 
 Whenever the first symptoms of the craving for 
 drink came upon me, I hastily made the sign of 
 the Cross upon my breast or in the air, just as 
 I had done in my childish days, when it had 
 seemed to me that every evil thought or sug- 
 gestion which entered my mind was whispered 
 in my ear by the devil, whom I thus hoped to 
 exorcise and drive away. 
 
 Early faiths die hard. I recollect seeing the 
 son of a professing atheist fall before his father's 
 eyes from the top of a high scaffold, and I re-
 
 164 A LITERACY GENT. 
 
 member that the cry of agony which rose to the 
 father's lips was not " My son ! " but " My 
 God ! " 
 
 Once more I knelt and prayed, and this time 
 it seemed as if help had verily and indeed come, 
 for when I arose my brain was clear and com- 
 posed, and what I wrote was at all events more 
 passable than anything I had penned for the 
 last five days. I worked on steadily the whole 
 afternoon and evening, and by the aid of strong 
 tea, I managed to complete my paper in time 
 for the midnight post. 
 
 " The next afternoon it was returned with a 
 note from the editor, asking what had come to 
 me that I had sent him such feeble stuff. To 
 publish it would, he said, bring only ridicule 
 upon us both ; and he warned me that I had 
 reached a critical point in my career, and that 
 if I valued my reputation I should immediately 
 set to work and rewrite the paper. " I can't 
 leave it out now," he added, in conclusion, 
 /'for the thing has been announced, and will be
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 165 
 
 looked for. I can give you three days more, 
 although I shall have to delay the publication of 
 the Review ; but for both our sakes, man, pull 
 yourself together, and rise to the occasion, no 
 matter what the cost! "
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 " Only this once ! " 
 
 FELT as I read his letter that Fate had 
 
 taken the thing out of my hand, and decided 
 for me. One course only remained open. 
 "For this once, and this once only," I said to 
 myself, " I must break my promise to' Colonel 
 Frazer or rather let me call it not the breaking 
 of my promise, but merely the postponement of 
 the day when that promise comes into force. 
 The paper, now that the thing has gone thus 
 far, must, as he says, be done in my old style 
 and in my best form, no matter what the cost. 
 After that I need be in no hurry to publish any- 
 thing else until my brain has accustomed itself 
 to working without stimulant ! " 
 
 Determined to lose no further time, I sent 
 out for whisky, and set to work. In two days 
 I had finished the paper to my own satisfaction 
 
 166
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 167 
 
 and to the editor's, and on the third I awoke to 
 start the new life which I was now determined 
 to lead. About the result I had no anxiety. 
 " The fact of my having abstained for so many 
 days is sufficient proof, if any were needed," I 
 said to myself, "of my ability to abstain al- 
 together, I could have continued to abstain 
 then, and should undoubtedly have done so, 
 but for the exceptional circumstances of my 
 having to rewrite that article to time circum- 
 stances which are never likely to occur again, 
 for I shall not accept any other important com- 
 mission until I have grown accustomed, as I 
 soon shall, to working without whisky ; and 
 when I have so accustomed myself, I hope and 
 believe that I shall do stronger and better work 
 without the aid of stimulants than I ever did 
 with them." I was so sanguine and self-confi- 
 dent, indeed, that I was half-inclined to ask 
 myself if my promise to Colonel Frazer had not 
 been a little unnecessary, and if I should not 
 have done better to have dropped the habit of
 
 168 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 drinking as he was so fussily set upon it by 
 slow degrees, and without making such an un- 
 called for "to-do" as was necessitated by a 
 sudden discontinuance. In fact, I began to feel 
 under the reaction from the strain which I 
 had put upon myself while wrestling with the 
 temptation to drink as if, like Don Quixote, I 
 had been fighting wind-mills, and as if no temp- 
 tation, except that which was created by my 
 own hysterical and overwrought imagination, 
 had ever existed. I recalled the experiment 
 which had once been made I think in Russia 
 by permission of the authorities, and in the 
 interests of science, upon two criminals under 
 sentence of death. One of them was put to 
 sleep in a room in which a woman had died the ] 
 night before ot Asiatic cholera. He was, how- 
 ever, left in blissful ignorance of the danger to 
 which he was exposed, and took no harm 
 whatever, The other was made to sleep in a 
 room which had been unoccupied for months, 
 but he was falsely told that the corpse of a
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 169 
 
 victim to cholera had only just been removed 
 from it. His terror was so great that it ab- 
 solutely created the disease which he feared, 
 for, in a few hours, he developed symptoms of 
 cholera, and died before the night was out. 
 
 Just so, I told myself, had I let my terror and 
 panic create a danger, where danger there was 
 none before ; and lulled into a false security, I did 
 what I had never dared to do since the day 
 when I had determined to break free from the 
 influence of drink I gave free rein to my 
 thoughts and let them wander forth to dally 
 with the enemy I had believed so deadly. 
 Scarcely had I allowed my mind to toy for a 
 few minutes with the temptation, before the 
 craving for stimulants was upon me again 
 at first a mere suggestion, so insidious and 
 pleading as hardly to need a thought, but which 
 I had barely recognised for what it was, before 
 it had ceased to dissemble, and was openly urg- 
 ing its claims ; and soon the suitor had become 
 the sovereign, and I who had been the master
 
 170 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 became the slave, until at last the thing domi- 
 nated me, so that my body seemed like the 
 bars of a cage which shut in a wild beast, mad 
 with an insatiable thirst. My first impulse, 
 when I recognised my danger, was to leap to 
 my feet, with the unreasoning fear of the 
 hunted creature upon me, and with an un- 
 governable impulse to seek refuge in flight, as 
 if from a bodily foe. But this lust was some- 
 thing more than a thirst ; it was something 
 more even than a physical craving ; it was 
 something within me ; a something which I 
 must carry with me wherever I went, and from 
 which it were as vain to seek escape by flight 
 as it would be for the wounded stag to flee 
 from the death-dealing arrow which is lodged 
 in its breast. 
 
 Just as a drunken man is pushed and shoved 
 an unwilling prisoner towards the police 
 station, so invisible hands seemed to push 
 me towards the door, as if to impel me in the 
 direction of the nearest place where drink was
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 171 
 
 to be obtained. I took a step forward as if 
 yielding, but all which was noblest in my nature, 
 all the better feelings which, like sleepless 
 sentinels during a siege, had kept unwinking 
 watch and ward with me for so many days, 
 sprang up to sound a wild alarm, and to call 
 upon me in the name of the woman I loved to 
 be true to myself and to my resolution. And 
 just as the drunken man, when he finds himself 
 overpowered by those who have taken him 
 prisoner, drops to the ground in order that he 
 may resist by the dead weight of his own in- 
 ertia the efforts which are being made to get 
 him to the station, so at that cry I let my limbs 
 slip from under me, lest they should be com- 
 pelled to carry me, against my will, to the goal 
 from which my soul recoiled. But the drink- 
 devil which possessed me was not thus to be 
 driven out or conquered, for even as I lay, I 
 felt the foul thing stirring again within me, and 
 gathering itself together for a final effort ; and 
 I knew that the supreme struggle of my life had
 
 172 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 come. In another minute I was wrestling with 
 it as a man wrestles for life and death with the 
 python which has him in its coils. I lay writh- 
 ing and twisting, and foaming at the mouth like 
 one in an epileptic fit, and fighting for my soul 
 with the fiend which possessed me, as the epi- 
 leptic fights for life with his disease. But like 
 the incoming of an irresistible sea, the desire 
 for drink swept over me, and possessed me, 
 until / became no longer a man, but A LUST. 
 In my despair I rose to my feet, and as I did 
 so, my hands played the traitor, and less in- 
 dependently of myself, than in spite of myself 
 stretched out mechanically to open the door, 
 and telling myself that even surrender and de- 
 feat, recognised as such, would be more endur- 
 able than the agonising suspense of such 
 resistance ; and dismissing, in the very dogged- 
 ness of despair, every thought which could bring 
 remorse or uneasiness, I stole out of the house 
 like a guilty thing, but with a heart beating 
 with a secret and savage joy.
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 173 
 
 And that night I was brought home from the 
 club dead-drunk ; and in the morning I received 
 a letter from Colonel Frazer, telling me that he 
 had heard of what had happened, and that I 
 must consider everything between Alice and 
 myself at an end.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Seventeen years after. 
 
 MINE is not a pleasant story, and though 
 I have found it necessary to dwell in 
 detail upon certain incidents which though ap- 
 parently trivial, are not so when considered as 
 links in the inevitable sepuence which connects 
 what is to be, with what is, and what is, with 
 what has been, there is much in my history 
 which I must leave the reader to fill in for him- 
 self. Every one of intelligence who knows as 
 much of a man's character as all who have 
 followed this narrative thus far know already of 
 mine, and who is given certain constitutional 
 tendencies in conjunction with certain circum- 
 stances, could in ninety-nine cases out of a 
 hundred predict the logical results. I shall 
 therefore pass over in silence the seventeen 
 years that intervened between the events just 
 
 174
 
 A LITERARY GENT, 175 
 
 described and the present time. Of my life 
 as it is now, I need only say that I live upon 
 the few shillings I earn by translating into 
 English, for a half-penny weekly, the jokes con- 
 tained in certain coarse comic French and 
 German journals. Sometimes I make ten, 
 sometimes eleven shillings a week enough to 
 procure me shelter for my head, and to find me 
 in sufficient brandy to keep body and soul to- 
 gether. Now and then, when I can get enough 
 brandy to set my brain working, I am so for- 
 tunate as to write something for which I receive 
 better pay, and then I get more brandy. 
 Such a stroke of luck happened to me lately, 
 for the post brought me, a day or two ago, an 
 order for fifteen shillings ; and though a cold 
 sleet was falling, and the street was an inch 
 deep in befouled snow, I started off at once to 
 cash it. I was all right when I came out of the 
 corner public-house, for if half a bottle of neat 
 brandy won't put heart into a man, nothing will ; 
 and I should have reached home comfortably
 
 176 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 enough, if it hadn't been that half-a-dozen boys 
 God strike them dead ! set up a yell when 
 they caught sight of me, and began pelting me 
 with snow-balls as fast as they could throw. If 
 I could only have got my hand on one of them, 
 I'd have twisted his damned neck for him, but 
 it's as much as I can do to hobble now, and I 
 could neither catch them nor get away. They 
 drove me into a corner at last, where I huddled 
 up, trying to shield my face from the rain of 
 kneaded and hardened snowballs which came 
 so fast and furiously that I was wet to the skin 
 and screamed with pain and cold. In sheer 
 despair, I turned upon my persecutors, and, 
 foaming at the mouth with impotent rage, called 
 God to witness that if there was justice in the 
 land I'd have the law on them and on the 
 skulking scoundrels who stood by laughing and 
 jeering and egging the young devils on. A 
 howl of derision, accompanied by a thicker 
 shower of the cruel missiles, was the only an- 
 swer ; and then a snowball with a jagged piece
 
 A LITERARY GENT. Ill 
 
 of flint embedded in it hit me in the mouth. 
 As I fell to the ground, with the blood stream- 
 ing down my face and clothes, a woman ran out 
 from an adjoining house to my assistance. She 
 helped me to my feet, and while I was holding 
 shakily to her shoulder, for I could not stand 
 by myself, she turned upon the bystanders ( the 
 boys had made off on her appearance), asking 
 them indignantly if there was an Englishman 
 among them, that they could stand by, jeering, 
 while an old and defenceless man was thus set 
 upon by a cowardly mob. As she did so, I saw 
 her face, and recognized it sounds like a 
 novel, or a Sunday-school story, doesn't it ? 
 Alice! I had been told that, after the break 
 with me, she had refused more than one offer 
 of marriage, and had gone to live and work 
 among the poor in East London. I had heard, 
 too, that she had lost all her good looks, and 
 that such was the case I saw at a glance, for 
 but for her voice, which was unchanged, I 
 should not have been sure it was she. 
 
 N
 
 178 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 It was a striking "situation," wasn't it? 
 And what a catching scene it would make for a 
 teetotal tract of the " look on this picture and 
 on that" type the meeting between the de- 
 graded, drink-sodden and ragged creature (I 
 am rather a scarecrow, I know) and the woman 
 whose lover he had once been ! 
 
 I suppose the right thing for me to have 
 done under the circumstances would have been 
 to tell her that I wasn't fit for such as she to 
 touch to have snivelled and talked pious, and 
 cried out after my "lost youth." 
 
 Do you think. I did so ? No ; when she 
 recognised me and called me my old pet name 
 I turned on her and cursed her to hell for her 
 interference, telling her to take her yellow 
 monkey face out of my sight before I struck 
 her.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 A Last Word. 
 
 A~>JD now one word, please, before I close. 
 Some of you who read this may be inclined 
 to pity me; to snuffle and grow sentimental about 
 my "wasted opportunities" and "shipwrecked 
 life.'' It is possible, even, that some of you 
 may recognise my identity, and affect a pitying 
 pain at the thought of the wretched and de- 
 graded creature who started life with such 
 promise. But you may spare me and yourself 
 your pity, for I do not need it, and I will have 
 none of it do you mark me? I will have 
 none of it. Keep it for some more " deserving 
 object," as you would say ; one who would not 
 as I would, were it offered me, spit and spurn it 
 back into your face with curses and blows. 
 You are over-generous and gratuitous with 
 your pity, you pious folks, sometimes attribu- 
 
 179
 
 180 A LITERARY GENT. 
 
 ting to the objects of your compassion sensibili- 
 ties and sufferings which do not exist. For, 
 listen ! the drunkard has no friend ; HE NEEDS 
 NONE, except the one friend which is more to 
 him than is your Christ to the Christian ; the 
 friend which is at once wife and child, father 
 and mother, sister and brother, and God ! 
 
 I have written out for you the story of my 
 life ; but I have not told you my reason for 
 doing this. I will do so, lest any of you should 
 think me one of those abject wretches who, 
 from the condemned cell, or the dishonoured 
 deathbed, send out maudlin messages about the 
 warning to be derived from their " awful ex- 
 ample." I'm not that sort, thank God ! and I 
 wouldn't lift a ringer to save one of my fellow 
 sinners from going the road that I have gone. 
 Let them go to hell, say I, and be damned to 
 them ; the hell that I'm bound for, and that 
 many a better fellow than I has gone to, and 
 will go to yet. No, I have only one reason 
 for writing this story. Can you not guess it ?
 
 A LITERARY GENT. 181 
 
 It is that I may sell it, as I'd sell my immortal 
 soul were I able for money to buy more 
 drink.
 
 A LOST SOUL.
 
 A LOST SOUL. 
 
 A WOMAN, who was very fair, lay with 
 her new-born babe at her bosom. And 
 as she lay, a Spirit, clad in shining robes, ap- 
 peared unto her, saying: "Look, that thou 
 mayest behold the Birth of a Soul ! " 
 
 Then the woman looked, and saw, as through 
 a silver mist, a realm whether far-off or near, 
 she knew not over which there rested a light 
 as serene as that of moonlight softened by 
 clouds. 
 
 And many forms she saw therein, among 
 which was one that was like unto her own babe ; 
 and, turning to the Spirit, she said : " What 
 place is this ? and whose is yonder child ? 
 
 And the Spirit made answer : " The place 
 which thou seest is the Abode of Souls, and the 
 child is the soul of thine own babe." 
 
 185
 
 186 A LOST SOUL. 
 
 Then the woman laughed, saying, " That may 
 not be, seeing that my child is alive, and lies 
 even now upon my bosom ; and it were more 
 easy for thee to persuade me that the thing 
 which I behold is my own soul, than that it is 
 the soul of my child ! " 
 
 And the Spirit said : " What, then, is the 
 thing which thou callest thy ' soul " ? 
 
 But the woman made answer, " I cannot tell." 
 
 Then said the Spirit: "Whenever a human 
 being is born into the world, there is born in 
 the Abode of Souls that human being's spiritual 
 counterpart, Thy soul abidest there, as does 
 the soul of every other human creature ; and as 
 is the growth of thy body on earth, so is the 
 growth of thy soul in the Abode of Souls, the 
 one keeping pace with the other." 
 
 And the woman said : " Myself is where my 
 body is, and there only ; and if, as thou sayest, 
 there is elsewhere another self which thou callest 
 my ' soul,' then is that other self not truly I."
 
 A LOST SOUL. 187 
 
 But the Spirit made answer : " Thy soul is 
 more truly thyself than thou art, for thy soul is 
 what thou really art, but the thing which I see 
 before me, which thou callest thyself is but what 
 thou seemest to be. And though thy outward 
 and bodily self be white and fair, yet if thine 
 inner and real self be evil and unclean, then will 
 thy soul be evil and unclean to look upon, so 
 that thou shalt be known even as thou art. 
 The thing which thou didst in public, calling 
 upon all men to witness, shall not be more 
 manifest than the thing which thou didst steal 
 away in secret to commit. Thou didst double- 
 lock thy chamber-door, that none might see 
 thee, but I tell thee that every deed thou doest 
 in the body nay, not only every deed which 
 thou doest, but the most secret thought of thine 
 inmost heart, is recorded upon the face of thy 
 soul, and cannot be hid." 
 
 Then said the woman : " Why tellest thou me 
 these things ? Are my sins greater than the 
 sins of others, that thou speakest thus ? Are
 
 188 A LOST SOUL. 
 
 there not murderers and adulterers, thieves and 
 Sabbath-breakers enough, that thou comest to 
 me, who am none of these ? My sins, which 
 are not many, I have long since repented, and 
 lo ! thou revilest me, as if I were the chief of 
 sinners ! " 
 
 Then said the Spirit: "If thou hast truly re- 
 pented of all thy sins, then is it well with thee 
 
 indeed ! " 
 
 " I look back upon thy past life, and I see it 
 lying behind thee like a river at first broad 
 and bold to gaze upon, but narrowing as it winds 
 away past mountain and plain and scenes thou 
 hast long since forgotten, until at last it becomes 
 but a line, and loses itself in the misty meadows 
 of childhood. But, as I look, I see, lying upon 
 the banks thereof, the unburied corpses of many 
 a strangled hope and murdered aspiration for 
 which thou wilt one day be called upon to an- 
 swer. And other and darker forms, too, I see, 
 which tell of evil deeds, of which thou canst 
 surely never think save with sorrow and shame.
 
 A LOST SOUL. 189 
 
 " But for every sin which thou has remem- 
 bered and repented, there are myriads which 
 thou hast forgotten. Dost thou think that be- 
 cause the very memory of -them has passed 
 from thy mind, so that they have become to thee 
 as though they had never been, that for this 
 reason they are not? 
 
 " I tell thee that in the day wherein thou shalt 
 look upon thine own soul, be it fair or foul, and 
 see it in all its nakedness the day which men 
 speak of as the ' Day of Judgment,' thou shalt 
 see the least of these unremembered, unre- 
 pented sins, writ large upon the face of thy 
 soul." 
 
 " But answer me, ere I go from thee : Is 
 there any one under thy roof or among the 
 human beings, whose lives thou art able, for 
 good or for evil, to influence, upon whose soul 
 thou dost seek to look? " J 
 
 And the woman made answer : " The souls 
 of all who are under my roof, I know, and need 
 not to see ; but one there is, my neighbour,
 
 190 A LOST SOUL. 
 
 who is very fair, and concerning whom I am 
 curious. Show me, then, her soul, that I may 
 learn whether what men say of her be true or 
 untrue." 
 
 But the Spirit said : " God hath not revealed 
 unto thee a vision of souls that so thou mayest 
 gratify an idle curiosity, but that thou mayest 
 realize thy responsibilities and profit thereby. 
 
 "And dost thou indeed think that thou know- 
 est the souls of all them that dwell under thy 
 roof, or that there is anyone on earth, who 
 knoweth even his own soul, as it is in the sight 
 of God? 
 
 " The heart of man resembles a secret cham- 
 ber wherein stands like the block of white 
 unhewn marble, set in the studio of a sculptor 
 a veiled figure. Though the man may not so 
 much as lift the corner of the veil, yet must he 
 forever and in secret work to fashion and to 
 form the figure that lies beneath. 
 
 " And the figure is the Soul of the man, and 
 the unveiling thereof is called death ; and until
 
 A LOST SOUL. 191 
 
 the figure be unveiled, the man scarce knoweth 
 what manner of man he is. 
 
 "And I tell thee that so far from knowing the 
 souls of all them who dwell under thy roof, 
 there are some among thy nearest and dearest 
 into the secret places of whose heart thou hast 
 never looked, and of whose real self thou 
 knowest scarce more than thou knowest of the 
 stranger in the street. 
 
 "Is there no speck in thine own heart, or in 
 thine own past, which thou wouldst wish that 
 the husband, whose soul thou countest one with 
 thine, should see with thy eyes, rather than-with 
 his, and which thou wouldst not hesitate to re- 
 veal in all its nakedness ? And dost thou think 
 thou knowest him better than he knoweth 
 thee?" 
 
 "The very child whom for many years thou 
 didst scarce venture to let out of thy sight, that 
 so thou mightest keep him from knowledge of 
 evil, and whose innocent face thou didst kiss 
 this morning, hugging thyself in thy heart that
 
 192 A LOST SOUL. 
 
 thou wast secure of his confidence and love 
 dost thou know that that child has already a 
 life apart from thee that he lives in a world 
 which is created for him, less by thy teaching 
 than by the talk of his companions and that 
 so far from scarce realizing, as thou dreamest, 
 the existence of evil, it may be that he is al- 
 ready old in the knowledge of sin ? " 
 
 The Spirit ceased, and through the silver 
 mist that veiled the Abode of Souls, the woman 
 saw many forms pass to and fro. Some were 
 fair to look upon, and some were foul ; and 
 others were neither fair nor foul ; and some few 
 she saw which she recognized readily, inasmuch 
 as they differed but little from the selves which 
 she knew. 
 
 Then said the Spirit : " Hast thou aught to 
 ask about any of these ? " 
 
 And, pointing with her finger, the woman 
 made answer : " One form I see which troubles 
 me, and which I seem to know, and yet know 
 not. Tell me, then, whose soul it may be."
 
 A LOST SOUL. 193 
 
 And the Spirit said : "Thy father's." 
 
 But the woman laughed, saying : " My father's 
 face is wrinkled, and his form feeble and bent, 
 but yonder figure is straight and lusty as a 
 sapling, and the face thereof hath the bloom 
 and the beauty of youth." 
 
 And the Spirit made answer: "The face of 
 thy father is wrinkled, and his form feeble and 
 old, but years have not hardened his heart, nor 
 aged his soul, and therefore dost thou see 
 him young and fair in the Abode of Souls." 
 
 And as the woman turned again to look into 
 the Abode of Souls, there arose before her the 
 form of a beautiful girl, who gazed upon her 
 with eyes full of pity and love. 
 
 And the Spirit spake to the woman, saying : 
 " Behold ! the soul of thy sister." 
 
 But the woman made answer : " The face of 
 my sister is as ill-favoured as mine is fair, and 
 yonder girl is more beautiful than I." 
 
 And the Spirit said : " Dost thou think be- 
 cause God hath chosen to make thee fair of 
 
 o
 
 194 A LOST SOUL. 
 
 face, and thy sister ill-favoured, that thou shalt 
 be fair and she ill-favoured to all eternity ? " 
 
 And as the woman, much wondering, turned 
 from him to gaze again upon the Abode of 
 Souls, another face rose up before her, upon 
 which she could not but look. 
 
 It was the face of one who had once been 
 fair ; but as the woman looked upon it, she 
 saw something written thereon, which repelled 
 her more than did the faces she had seen that 
 were low and animal. No sensual vice had 
 loosened the lip, bleared the eye, or bloated 
 the complexion ; but meanness had set its mark 
 upon the mouth and pinched the nostrils ; and 
 sordid, respectable self-seeking and self- 
 righteousness had made hard the heart, and 
 deadened the spiritual nature more surely than 
 vice or sin ; so that the woman felt, as she 
 looked, that she was gazing upon the face of 
 one who was lower in the scale of being and 
 farther from the Kingdom of God, than are the
 
 A LOST SOUL. 195 
 
 wretched creatures whom this world calls 
 'fallen' or 'lost.' 
 
 And turning to the Spirit, she said : "Who 
 art thou ? and what is yonder evil shape ? " 
 
 And the Spirit replied : "I am the Angel of 
 Death and Judgment, and the thing which thou 
 beholdest is thyself, and the soul which thou 
 hast made." 
 
 Then, laughing scornfully, the woman made 
 answer : "By this I know that thou are a lying 
 Spirit, whom I need neither fear nor heed : for 
 behold ! I have but dreamed a dream ! ' ' 
 
 And the Spirit replied: "Thou hast indeed 
 dreamed a dream, but the name of that Dream 
 was Life, and now thou dr earnest no longer''
 
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