aware that, adjoining the residence of Herr Popp is the private lunatic asylum of Herr Christian? You are also aware that the gardens are only separated by low fences, and that the sitting-room of M. Jansiewich opened by a glass door upon that portion of pleasure-ground immediately proximate to the most favourite walk of the patients?”
A gleam of light shot over the woman’s face, as she collected all her mental energies to follow the clue.
“Mark you, it was often M. Jansiewich’s habit to walk by this fence, and converse with those mild lunatics who were suffered to take the air alone. He was heard once, twice, thrice to quarrel with a crack-brained officer, proved by the witness of his attendants to be good-tempered enough when not put out, but liable to fits of frenzy. On the morning of the twenty-seventh, the sane man and the insane man were heard sneering at each other, reviling at each other. Yesterday, an iron-handed garden-rake was found in a shrubbery, exactly corresponding to the shape of the wound upon M. Jansiewich’s head, and this very tool had been seen in the hands of the officer that morning. I ask you to connect these facts. I ask you, Madame, to connect these facts, and I am sorry that you should ever have been placed in a position to reap the benefit of them.”
Norah Talobre Martyn died a few days after the communication narrated above, and was buried in the little grave-yard of Zuffenhausen. Her grave is surmounted by a wooden cross on which hangs a crown of thorns, placed thereby the rough, pitying hands of her nurse; the same good hands bear flowers and evergreens to the mound on Saints’ days, and keep the cross free from weather-stain, or soil. Pierre Talobre and his young wife never again appeared in Cannstatt. In Paris, in Berlin, in St. Petersburg they live their varied life of gaieties and quarrels, in alternate extravagance and want.
Perhaps they have often envied the peace of their victim. Perhaps this envy has taught them a better wisdom than their own lives could ever do. It is to be hoped so.
FORETHOUGHT FOR WINTER NIGHTS.
There are a few persons in England who remember, and who will never forget while they live, the winter of 1811—1812, for the misery it was to be alone after dark, and the terror of going to bed. On the 9th of that December, the whole family of the Marrs and their shop-boy, near Ratcliffe Highway, were murdered in a quarter of an hour, with singular brutality, their brains being dashed out with a mallet. The servant-girl had been sent out for oysters; and, on her return, the household were all lying dead.
On the 19th of the same month, the whole family of the Williamsons, in the same neighbourhood, were barbarously murdered in the same manner. For some time no discovery was made beyond the arrest of one man, who hanged himself in prison without having made any disclosures. I remember the horror of the murderers being known to be abroad, and the anxiety in every house about bolts and bars, and the search before going to bed. I remember the shrinking from all intercourse with all strangers who applied for work, or by any means obtained access to any dwelling. I was then nine years old; and the care with which parents avoided the subject before the children, and the new indulgence about lights in the chambers, and about placing somebody within call, only deepened the impression on the minds of timid children. I remember being utterly unable to carry a message across the hall after dark, and being so paralysed by a cry of “Stop thief!” in the street, as to be incapable of joining the dance in the middle of the room by firelight.
It was useless to tell us children (as I heard neighbours say to each other) that only two or three persons could well have been engaged in the murder of the Marrs and the Williamsons; and that those two or three probably remained in London, and certainly could not be all over the kingdom at the same time. In many of our cities there were serious alarms of the gang being present; and every stranger in the streets was an object of suspicion. It was a winter never to be forgotten.
This was only a strong instance of the alarm which pervades society from criminals of the worst class being known to be at large. The same sort of panic, less vivid, but still very painful, has recurred repeatedly since. The nearest approach to it was perhaps a few winters ago, when burglaries were extraordinarily frequent. They seemed to be stopped for the time by the servants of a gentleman living in Regent’s Park shooting a burglar.
At present there is something of the same feeling of insecurity from the dreadful cases of rape and murder which have roused the wrath and horror of all England. When we heard, the other day, that Mr. Hall the farmer was dead, we were all thankful that the wretched father of the murdered Miss Hall was out of his pain. If we could hardly bear the thought of her fate—brutally murdered on her way to church—we could not wonder that he took to his bed at once, or that he died before the year was out. And just when he died, there was another case,—that of a poor little servant-girl, sent out for candles, who never returned, and was found dead, set up against a tree.
Both these murders were done by ticket-of-leave men. One of them is hanged: and there seems to be no doubt that the other will be hanged too: but the public mind is not much relieved by the riddance of the individual criminals. The class of ticket-of-leave men is abroad, and the universal terror of them is so strong that, as all sensible men are saying, something must be done to remedy the intolerable evils of our present system,—the sense of insecurity in which we are living on their account, and the injustice with which a large class is treated by us, for the crimes of a very small proportion of their number. All men and women who come out of prison—whatever their offence, and whatever may be their state of mind and character—are feared and hated as much as the desperadoes who are improperly at large. By this