The Quaternion.
We suspect there is scarcely a life of a great man, whether he has been great for good or for evil, in which you will not find passages that are analogous to some things in your own. As with the physical monsters, described by such men as Dr Denham, in which there is always a natural foundation out of which grow the amorphous excrescences which we call monstrosities, so in the moral there is always something that pertains to the natural, insomuch that we may say, that the abnormal beings who go by the name of monsters are, as respects their unenvied peculiarity, the result of a twist in the development of what was intended to be according to the ordinary rule. The observation may serve as a cave diabolum even to those who think they are for certain out of the reprobatory decrees.
William Burke was born in the parish of Orrey, county of Tyrone, Ireland, in the spring of 1792. When at school, he was distinguished as an apt scholar, and was, besides, cleanly and active in his habits. Though bred a Catholic, he was taken when very young into the service of a Presbyterian minister, a circumstance which may explain the religious tendencies he subsequently exhibited; but even at this early period, he began to shew signs of that versatility of purpose which, leading sometimes to success, more often ends in vagabondism. Having left the minister to try the trade of a baker, he renounced that for the occupation of a weaver; and from that he enlisted in the Donegal militia. Yet in the midst of these changes he observed so much moral regularity that he was selected by one of the officers as his servant. While thus employed he married a young woman in Ballinha; and after seven years he returned to live with her, on the disbanding of the regiment. Still with a fair character, he then became the servant to a neighbouring gentleman, with whom he lived three years. Meanwhile he had a family by his wife; and having taken it into his head that he would be able to maintain them by getting a sub-lease of a piece of ground from his father-in-law, who was himself a tenant, he insisted for this right, which was refused, and the quarrel which ensued sent him to Scotland. Still, however, even in his advanced manhood, without any other stain than an imputed infidelity to his wife, we are assured, at least, that as yet he had shewn no indications of what may be termed cruelty even by the fastidious, if it was not that he bore the reputation of mildness approaching to softness.
Yet he came to Scotland with this blot on his soul, and it was soon deepened, when, having gone to work as a labourer on the Union Canal, he fell in, at Meddiston, with Helen M‘Dougal, a comely, if not good-looking, young widow, then residing there after the death of her husband. It has been always said that this was an affair of love, at least it ended in a connexion so close that they resolved to live together.
It would appear that the connexion thus formed having been communicated to his priest, he was admonished, and recommended to return to his wife; and a consequence of his refusal was the ordinary excommunication. Yet he continued to have religious fits, during the continuance of which he avoided the chapel, from the terrors of the anathema. We trace him afterwards, as he returned with his paramour to Edinburgh, where he fell, as the consequence of his continued versatility, into peripatetic pedlery, buying and vending old clothes, skins of animals, human hair, and other small articles and wares. Nor did he stick by this, soon betaking himself to cobbling, for which, in a rude way, he discovered that he had a turn, though he had never been taught the craft; and by purchasing old shoes and boots, to which he applied his art, and getting M‘Dougal to hawk them, he contrived to realise fifteen or twenty shillings a-week. At this time he was a lodger in “The Beggars’ Hotel,” kept by the well-known Mikey Culzean,—an establishment which had a famous termination, when, being one day burned to the ground, there came forth, driven by the flames, such a swarm of beggars, halt and blind, that their congregation seemed as difficult to account for as the assemblage of a colony of rats. Among them appeared Burke and M‘Dougal; but there were left behind in the fire the library of the cobbler, consisting of Ambrose’s “Looking unto Jesus,” Boston’s “Fourfold State,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Booth’s “Reign of Grace.” Once more he became a lodger with Mikey, who took up a new hotel in Brown’s Close, Grassmarket.
That the man, originally neither cruel nor profane, was not yet, like Balaam, left to his idol, would appear from his continued religious exercises. The grace of the Lord tracks the devil in his darkest caves. In the next house the candle of salvation burned, and even cast its light into the thick atmosphere of the surrounding dens. Thither Burke repaired, and joined, with apparent seriousness, in the exercise of devotion; nor did he fail to tax the incurable Mikey with profanity, when that notorious lover of a joke, even at the expense of divine things, thrust his head through the papered partition, and cried out, to the dismay of the devotees, “The performance is just going to begin.” In all this there seemed to be no hypocrisy, because there was no use to which he tried to turn it; and then his conversations on the subject of the service, which, after the company dispersed, he had with the man in whose house the meetings were held, seemed to be too secret for the displays of the mere dissembler.
Other traits conspired to shew the nature of the man, before the temptations of the idol changed it. Kind and serviceable, inoffensive and playful, he was industrious as well, and seldom inclined for drink. Fond of singing and playing on the flute, he sought, in his melancholy moods, the solace of plaintive airs. All which qualities were combined with a jocular and quizzical turn, which, displaying a fund of low humour, made him a favourite. Some anecdotes are given in illustration,—as where, one day, when he heard a salt-wife bawling out, “Wha’ll buy salt?” he replied, “Upon my word, I doun’t know; but if you ask that woman gaping at the door opposite, perhaps she may inform you;” or where, on another, when, having been abused by a painted Jezebel on the High Street, he tried to shame her by an accusation: “I might have passed over the painting,” said he, “if it had been properly done, but it’s shameful to come to the street bedaubed in that unskilful way,”—an objurgation which was applauded by the bystanders.
Yet, withal, there were deductions to be made from such favourable accounts, inducing the conviction that there is small faith due to drawn characters, where, perhaps, the potentialities may have been asleep, only awaiting the touch of the demon. But is not this less or more the case with all of us? if it be not metaphysically true that every unregenerated man has his price,—that is, every such man has a sacrifice of moral principle to sell, if a price and a purchaser can be found to his liking. What a million of money will not purchase, may be bought by the smile or tear of a woman. The paradox cannot be disproved, because the eventualities of temptation cannot be exhausted in any one man’s life. This man, though appearing to have kindly feelings, could be cruel to the woman who, whatever her faults, had followed him in all his wanderings and misery; but then, of course, there was the occasion, as where, having roused her jealousy by attentions to a young woman who was related to her, he, in return for her complaints, almost murdered her. The story current at the time was, that the three having slept in the same bed, the quarrel began between the two women, who, betaking themselves to the floor, entered into a battle. So long as the conflict was maintained on nearly equal terms, the man contented himself with witnessing it; but when the elder virago was likely to master the young one, he rose out of bed, and interfered in behalf of the latter. His interference soon turned the scale; and he inflicted an unmerciful punishment upon his partner. Then came the neighbours, who found M‘Dougal extended upon the floor apparently lifeless, with the man standing by, and contemplating. After some time she exhibited signs of life, when again seizing her by the hair, he cried, “There is life in her yet!” and dashed her head violently on the floor. By this time the police were attracted by the noise, who, upon asking Burke whether the woman was his wife, got the reply in a mild, if not insinuating tone, “Yes, gentlemen, she is my wife.”
We thus get to one of the secrets of this man’s character. The passions are said to occur in opposite phases—strong loves, and strong hatreds, and so forth; but there is one which nature, in love, has reserved, pure, solitary, and unchangeable, without counterpart to dim its lustre, or antagonist to neutralise its effect, and that is pity. This man wanted pity. If we were fanciful, we might here go with the gentle poets, who tell us, in their way, that, like the dew-drop which falls in the evening, and shines equally clear on the deadly nightshade and the rose, it solaces virtue in adversity, without scorning sin in the pains of retribution. If, in our analysis of man’s character, we find not his heart, as the fire-opal, enclosing one of nature’s tears, we may throw the crucible aside, extinguish the fire, and cast the caput mortuum to the dogs; and yet dogs have pity. We have found, even already, enough to lead us to another clue. He possessed radical cunning, the greatest and most insuperable of all the obstacles to moral and religious emendation. Other evils only hang about the heart, but this, the true gift of the devil, is the very blood of the organ. We are, then, led to suspect him of religious hypocrisy. If we were not told there is hope for all, we might surely say that the advent of the Spirit of grace is possible in every case but that of hypocrisy veiled by religion; yea, the creature cursed with this vice, Faith views in the distance as an impossibility, and flies past in despair, to try her persuasions on the honest sinner.
The subsequent notices of this man’s life, up to the commencement of the deeds which have rendered him famous, only tend to confirm these observations. Renouncing once more his cobbling, he went, still followed by his partner, to Peebles, where he was employed in road-making. Though still maintaining some pretensions to religion, he now began to shew a gradual deterioration of character, keeping suspicious hours, and making his house the resort of profligate characters, where scenes of drunkenness and riot were of common occurrence, especially on Saturday nights and Sundays. Retaining the same vagrant habits, he next betook himself to Penicuik, and after the harvest of 1827, still accompanied by M‘Dougal, he came once more to reside in Edinburgh, where the occasion offered of getting acquainted with Hare, and becoming a lodger with him in his house in Tanner’s Close, called Log’s lodgings. This house, which afforded room for seven beds, was kept under the name of Mrs Hare’s first husband, Log, and being the resort of all kinds of loose wanderers, washed off from the lowest bed of the conglomerates, was the scene of still greater riots than the lodger had ever patronized in his own. That the intimacy between him and his landlord had soon ripened into such friendship as these people are capable of, was proved by an occurrence mentioned by a person who called on Burke with the intention of giving him a job. He found Hare beating without mercy his friend’s paramour, who was extended on the floor, while Burke was sitting unconcernedly at the window. When asked why he allowed another man to beat his wife, “Oh, she deserves all she is getting,” was the reply. Yet the man still preserved more of a respectable character than those with whom he here associated—retaining even yet much of his disposition to serve, his quiet humour, if not a species of politeness, all of which was perfectly reconcilable with the presence of that potentiality of crime which lay slumbering in the heart, under the thin veil of religion, and not to be crossed or checked, when roused to action, by pity, no trace of which appeared to be in him. He was set aside for his idol, and only waited the temptation to become what he became.
William Hare, the second of our quaternion, was also a native of Ireland, having been born in the neighbourhood of Londonderry. Like so many of the poor children of that country, he was never trained to any trade whereby he might have been saved from that gradual descent into desultory modes of earning a livelihood, which leading, as we have already said, to vagabondism, is the introduction to so many temptations. After working at country work for some time near his native place, he came over to Scotland, where he engaged as a common labourer upon the Union Canal, and assisted for some time in the work of unloading Mr Dawson’s boats at Port-Hopetoun. It was here that he became acquainted with Log or Logue, to whose widow he was subsequently married, and with whom he came to lodge. After the canal was finished, he betook himself to the occupation of a travelling huckster, going about the country with an old horse and cart, selling at one time fish, at another crockery, or exchanging the latter for old iron, which he disposed of to the dealers. From the cart and the horse he went down to the hurley, using that vehicle for much the same purposes. Some quarrel with Log, before the latter’s death, drove him to new quarters; but not long after, and when Log had been dead and buried, he returned to Tanner’s Close, where he assumed all the rights of the landlord of seven beds, as well as the privileges of the husband, though Mrs Log was never called by his name.
It was now that, having tasted power in becoming a landlord with such drawings as twopence or threepence a night, he shewed more of his character than had previously been known. Always inclined to take drink, wherever and whenever he could get it, he now, as a consequence of idleness and opportunity, became drunken and dissolute—the effect of liquor being to render him quarrelsome and always ready to fight. Nay, so strong was this propensity in him, that he appeared always to be on the outlook for a contest, picking a quarrel upon any opportunity, and even trying to make one out of the simple act of looking at him. Though a sorry pugilist, he had no fear of an opponent twice his size, and never gave in until fairly disabled—even then endeavouring to wreak, in so far as oaths could, a vengeance on the head of his enemy. On the failure of an opponent without, he had no difficulty, so long as Mrs Log was there, of finding one within; nor was she, also a drunkard, loath to encounter him upon equal terms, so that the house was seldom free from brawls, if it did not often exhibit a regularly-contested battle between the master and mistress. Even vice has its traits of ludicrousness. Those of the neighbours who were fond of sights were often enough gratified by some wag going and reporting to the landlady that Willie Hare, as he was usually called, was upon the street drunk, whereupon the wife, herself probably in the same state, would issue forth in search of him, when a battle was the issue of the rencontre. Such was the kind of life led by this couple up to the time of Burke’s entry.
The passion of violence produced by inebriation will not always, or indeed often, afford any clue to character. It may be hardly necessary to say that Hare was naturally cruel, yet we have seen that Burke could scarcely be said to present that feature unless when roused by some strong motive, so that we have no difficulty in finding at the first glance an essential difference in the two men;—the one being, in his very nature and constitution, vindictive and malign—the other ready to suffocate the humanity that was in him at the beck of an impulse strong enough to move him. Only one of them could probably have been guilty of such an action as this: On one occasion, when a person of the name of M‘Lean (the narrator) was returning from shearing at Carnwath, he got into company with Hare, Burke, and his wife, and the party went into a public-house at Balerno, near Currie, to get some refreshment. When the reckoning was, as they call it, clubbed, Hare snatched up the money from the table and pocketed it, whereupon Burke, in the fear of a disturbance, advanced the sum. On leaving the inn, M‘Lean taxed the offender with his trick, who, in place of being ashamed or even pocketing the affront, knocked the feet from his companion, laid him on the ground, and kicked him with his shoe pointed with iron plates. If we add to this inborn malignity which, in feeling, whether expressed by words or acts, arrayed him against mankind, and scarcely ever alleviated by those emotions of friendship which are to be found in the most hardened breasts, that scorn of human nature, not unaccompanied with satirical laughter, to which we have alluded, we have that foundation of character in the man upon which was so easily reared the towering edifice of his crimes.
Yet after all this information, which was so industriously gleaned, the psychologist was not satisfied. He wanted to vindicate human nature from even a possible diverging incidence of a law which could account for such crimes, by tracing them to malignity and mammon. We would fain look with favour on such scepticism; and it is to be admitted that all who had the curiosity to see and converse with this man discovered a want. With a low animal brow, he justified the phrenologist by discovering no power of ratiocination, if, indeed, what is termed reasoning was not an impossibility to him. His mind was entirely under the government of external objects, among which selfishness made its selection, irrespective of the humanities, of which he had none. We might thus term him, as he has been called, a fool or semi-idiot, only within the limits of that responsibility which the law is bound, for the preservation of mankind, to push far beyond the verge where nature draws her distinctions between the morally sane and the insane. We thus get quit of the heavy imputation which the doings of such a man cast upon our kind; and if we are met by the reflection, that Burke had both thought and sense to an extent which was rather a surprise to those who conversed with him with a view to ascertain the structure of his mind, we have the advantage of the reply, that, naturally indolent, if not soft, he allowed himself to be ruled by another, who, with all his defects, possessed resolution and a dominating will. The history of mankind is full of the phenomena of “imposed will”—the source of more divergence from the normal line than we ever dream of.
We come now to the third of our quaternion, Helen M‘Dougal, a native, as we have said, of the small village of Meddiston, in the parish of Muiravonside, and county of Stirling, where her early years were spent. Her maiden name was Dougal. At no time, however early, did her character exhibit any such diversity of oscillation between the good and the evil, as, giving play to contending passions, creates an interest in the inquirer into human nature. All seemed to be straight, on and down from the beginning. At an early period she formed a connexion with a man, M‘Dougal, who resided in the same village, to whom she bore a child during the lifetime of his wife. After the latter’s death, the intercourse which continued led to cohabitation, passing for marriage, and she bearing his name. Afterwards coming together to Leith, where he followed his occupation of a sawyer, she was left alone, poor and friendless, by his death, which took place from typhus while he was confined in Queensberry House. She now returned to her native village, where she met with Burke, then, as we have seen, a labourer on the canal, when that intercourse commenced, the evil auspices of which were to be so terribly verified. Thereafter, wherever they resided, there seems never to have been much change in the character of this woman. In Edinburgh, Leith, Peebles, or Penicuik, she was always distinguished for loose and drunken habits; nor were these ever relieved by any geniality of nature, the uniform expression of her mind and countenance being a stern moroseness which concentrated upon her universal dislike, so that it was often said that she was unworthy even of Burke. From all this it may easily be induced that she was not, in the crimes of which she was cognisant, or in which she took a part, under any influence of an imposed will on the part of Burke; the contrary being rather to be presumed, that she ruled him, and that it was only when he was roused by her fierceness of temper or jealousy that he repaid her domination by a cruel punishment.
The last of the four, Margaret Laird or Hare, was, like her husband, a native of Ireland, and accompanied her first husband, Log, to Scotland. The latter bore the character of a decent, hard-working man, who had not only the world out of doors to contend with, but within, the temper of a masculine wife. Some success enabled him to become a small contractor on the Union Canal, and for some time he worked his contract, with a detachment of his countrymen, in the neighbourhood of Winchburgh; but we may estimate the extent of his contract, and not less the Irish peculiarity of both the man and his wife, when we know that the contractor’s lady worked along with the men in the character of a labourer, with a man’s coat on her back, wheeling a barrowful of rubbish as stoutly as any of her men. At that time, they inhabited a temporary hut on the banks of the canal, and, whatever her faults may have been, she exhibited here nothing but economy and industry. The work being finished, Log settled in Edinburgh, where, though honest enough, the contractor became sunk in the huckster, and the keeper of a beggars’ hotel, which was soon to rival even Mickey Culzean’s. Upon his death, the lodging and furniture, such as it was, with any small earnings he had saved, devolved upon the widow, and thereafter she conducted the establishment; but she soon shewed the smallness of her gratitude and the strength of her passion by cohabiting with one of her lodgers, described as young and good-looking, and, thereafter, the depravity of her taste in accepting Hare after the young lover forsook her. Yet her choice was only that which is made by those who seek their kind. The drunkard and semi idiot had charms for one who was herself destitute not less of virtue than of prudence, and we are soon to see her descending into unparalleled crime, not by the imposed will of Hare, but the ready suggestion of her own heart.
Such are the characters of our wonderful story; and we make no apology to sensible men for disentombing such specimens of our kind from the dust-covered chronicles of their deeds. A salutary horror, not only of their great crimes, but also of those lesser ones which led to these, pervaded the people of Scotland long after the tragedy of so many acts and scenes was performed; and thus it is, in the providence of God, that virtue becomes brighter by the contrast with vice. It is only, as some one has observed, when the tempest tosses the waves of the ocean into mountains that we see into its depths. It was by the light of burning Troy that Æneas saw the faces of the gods; and so it is through the light of human passions that we discover the nature of the heart of man.
The Opening of the Court—The Old Woman of Gilmerton.[5]
The house which went by the name of Log’s lodging-house, and which was occupied by William Hare, as raised by the favour of the widow to the elevation of landlord, was, as already said, situated in Tanner’s Close,—one of those narrow passages that wind from the north side of the West Port. The entry from the street begins with a descent of a few steps, and is dark from the superincumbent land. On proceeding downwards, you came—for the house, which was rased for shame, is no longer to be seen—to a smallish self-contained dwelling of one flat, and consisting of three apartments. One passing down the close might, with an observant eye, have seen into the front room; but this disadvantage was compensated by the house being disjoined from other dwellings, and a ticket, “Beds to let,” as an invitation to vagrants, so many of whom were destined never to come out alive, distinguished it still more. The outer apartment was large, occupied all round by these structures called beds, composed of knocked-up fir stumps, and covered with a few gray sheets and brown blankets, among which the squalid wanderer sought rest, and the profligate snored out his debauch under the weight of nightmare. Another room opening from this was also comparatively large, and furnished much in the same manner. In place of any concealment being practised, so far impossible, indeed, in the case of a public lodging-house, the door stood generally open, and, as we have said, the windows were overlooked by the passengers up and down; but as the spider’s net is spread open while his small keep is a secret hole, so here there was a small apartment, or rather closet, the window of which looked upon a pig-sty and a dead wall, and into which, as we know, were introduced those unhappy beings destined to death. The very character of the house, the continued scene of roused passions, saved it from that observation which is directed towards temporary tumults, so that no surprise could have been excited by cries of suffering issuing from such a place, even if they could have been heard from the interior den; and that was still more impossible, from the extraordinary mode of extinguishing life adopted by the wary and yet unwary colleagues. In this inner apartment Burke used to work when he did work, which, always seldom, soon came to be rare, and eventually relinquished for other wages.
It will thus be seen that this small dark room was the appropriate place where the words of secrecy would pass to the ear, or be blurted forth, coarse and broken, under the fevered brain of drunkenness. Since ever that night when the £7, 10s. flared its magnetic influence over their eyes, and was communicated, by confidence and sympathy, to the two females, the little world of this quaternity was changed. The women saw that other lodgers would die, and the inspiring hope, not so demoniac as to curdle the remaining drops of human kindness that refused to leave the female breast, pointed in the inevitable direction of gaudy finery, which they might flaunt in the wondering eyes of the poor people of Portsburgh; but so slow a process did not suit the inflamed passions of the men. Hare had been revolving in his mind a scheme to set up his own will as the arbiter of the occasion, which would secure more money, even as he wished it; and the secret of this talisman behoved to be communicated to his friend, now poor and miserable, and dissolved in habits of sloth and inebriety. It was in that small room, and while the two women were engaged in the front apartments, that this mystic rite was performed between the solitary inmates, over, as might be expected, the caldron fires of drink. Yes, the mouth found power to utter the words which came as the dictates of a mere desire for money, that they should seize the opportunity so often presented to them of people lying drunk and senseless, and deprive them, by suffocation, of life. The proposition was accepted under the same approving auspices of mammon, who had already made both his own; and under the force of that temptation involved in the words which had been uttered in Surgeon’s Square, offering a welcome to a return with a similar burden to that of the pensioner. You may cease to indulge here in those visions of the fancy which would represent human nature in convulsions, panting under the impression of a thought which, at first, produced a revolt, and then became conciliated. The “make” of each of these men was perfect under its own conditions, and if there was any seriousness, it was only a passing fear that they might bring their necks into jeopardy. Pity, which never lived in them, could not be said to be dead; the impress of the first money had burned into their souls; the welcome of the doctors rung in their ears; and Grace, studying them in the distance, had flown past them as an impossibility.
There is reason to believe that this resolution come to by these men, sitting together in this dark room, passed as an element into an orgy, different from all those in which they had so often indulged, if not from any that the world ever witnessed; nor was it modified, if it was not inflamed, by those visions of struggling nature expiring among their hands, which, rising as mere spectral forms, disappeared as soon before the images they pictured of a life of sensual indulgence and enervating sloth. If the project had sprung out of the ebullitions of intoxicated passions, it might have died away on the morrow, but, the result of calculation, it only received strength from the hopes which it roused, and which again were inflamed by the celebration. Nay, time, as day by day passed without a likely lodger coming in, increased the desire to begin, and chafed them into impatience. Hare accordingly resolved to commence prowling about the streets for some promising individual whom he might seduce into the house, and for some days he followed this occupation, but his efforts failed, and the report at night only again inflamed the desire of the morning. One afternoon, it was in December 1827, he again betook himself to the street, and for hours dodged about searching among the poor and miserable for some one who, already intoxicated, might offer those facilities to a beginner which were afterwards held of small account when practice gave proficiency and success confidence. At last he observed in the Grassmarket a decent-looking elderly woman (Abigail Simpson, as afterwards ascertained) whose wandering eye and irregular step shewed that she had got more of the publican’s drug than her perhaps weak head could carry. His eye was immediately fixed upon her, and the old smile, which always obeyed the bidding of an evil thought, played over his face, nor did he let her out of his sight as he dogged her irregular movements from place to place. He could see that she was poor, that she was probably friendless, and, above all, that she was tipsy, and he knew enough of degraded nature to tell him what the proverb has settled, Qui a bu boira,—he who has drunk will drink more. Making up to her, he introduced himself as one who had met her before, and to his delight, discovered that she was inclined to be communicative, if not garrulous. It was not a difficult matter to advise her to accompany him to his house, where he would treat her with the old bribe of “a dram.” So away they trudged together, the dissembler taking special care as he went to keep her on her course, from which she was every moment inclined to stray, by professions of interest and friendship.
Arrived at the lodging-house, the woman was introduced to Burke, with what looks between the two may easily be imagined, as an old friend, and drink was immediately procured. There was now a party which was joined by the two women, who, when they saw the men plying the stranger with whisky—the full value of which their difficulty in getting it to the extent they desired was sufficiently known to them—must have been aware that there was at the bottom of this generosity more than the friendship professed by men dead to the feeling, even as regards those who might have had a claim to it. The time passed, and the party became merry, nor was the stranger the least joyous of them, for had she not fallen among friends by sheer accident? and should she not prove her gratitude by being happy, ay, and communicating to them all her secrets? Was she not fortunate in being able to tell them that she was a pensioner of a gentleman in the New Town, who paid her regularly one shilling and sixpence a-week, besides little gratuities, such as the can of kitchen-fee she carried with her, and put aside till she should depart? Yes, and more, that she was blessed with a fine young daughter she had left at home, and who would be anxiously waiting her return. And then that daughter was not only good, she was beautiful, and the very pride of her soul. All this Hare heard; and he could carry out the play she had begun, even amidst the intentions he entertained, by expressing an interest in the mother’s paragon, so deeply felt, that, being unmarried, he would put in for her hand, provided the mother would consent. And consent she did, so far as her condition would allow, and here, newly forged, was another bond of friendship. Nay, when he and the daughter should have become man and wife, it behoved that they could not live without the good old mother—who, accordingly, would take up her residence with them, with no more cares of poverty, and no dependence upon the pensioning gentleman of the New Town.
Could any human creature be more happy? Nor were the actors less so, though for a reason so very different. But the drink went done, even with the forbearance of the men, that she who would pay so dearly for it should have enough for their purpose. Mrs Hare had money, and there was the can of kitchen-fee, which the stranger could sell, and take home with her—when the time came—the price, one and sixpence, to help her little pension, and get a dram at another time, when they would not be there to give it to her. Then, to make the play even more merry and ingenious, this small sum was, very soon after, again, taken from the now almost unconscious woman’s pocket, and laid out on more spirits, that the expected opportunity might be made more propitious. The scene progressed with even increased symptoms of noisy merriment. The old woman revived, and, under so many influences bearing on a kindly heart, did her best to sing some of her old songs—household words to her, no doubt, and feelings as well, with which she often at home wiled back the days of her youth, and charmed the ear of that daughter of whom she was so proud and so fond. Nay, we have the hearsay of the day for saying, that Burke contributed his part, singing, as he was so much in the habit of doing, some of those airs, generally, according to the account of those who knew him, sentimental, if not melancholy.
And here we are obliged absolutely to stop for a moment, not that we wish to intrude upon the reader a moralising spirit, where every word suggests a sermon out of more hardened things than stones, but that we are mystified, and are inclined to ask counsel. Could that man have had any sense of the beautiful in the sentiments of these lyrics which, it was said, he sang with feeling, if not pathos? Can it be possible that such a sense can be consistent with a demoralisation such as his? We suspect that it is. We are led to expect its impossibility by a reference to opposite, if not antagonistic, feelings: we cannot love and hate the same object. This is true, and would seem to disprove our proposition à priori. We can reconcile the contradiction only by having recourse to the different faculties of the imagination and the sense. The poet who has ravished his readers by a description of the beauty of female virtue and innocence has been found in a brothel. One of the most touching religious poems in the world has been sung by one who, among brawling revellers, maligned religion and its votaries. The praises of temperance have been enchantingly poured forth by a bacchanal. The oppressor of the poor has wept at a representation of affecting generosity. Any one may fill up the list without perhaps including a hypocrite. The imagination has its emotions, and the sense its feelings, or, perhaps, no feelings. The why and the wherefore touch the ultimate, and we are lost; but the fact remains, as proved by evidence, that William Burke could, in song, be pathetic.
Recurring to our real tragedy, the effect of the drink soon again sent the creature from her lyrics into a condition which might have suited the purpose of the men; but whether it was that, as beginners, they lost courage, or that lodgers came in and defeated their intentions, they failed that night in effecting their object. The unconscious woman was lifted into a bed, where she lay till the morning. A severe sickness was the consequence of the importunities of her new-made friends; and the colleagues, exasperated by their defeat of the previous night, were alongside of the bed, with offerings of sympathy, and more drink. In the midst of all this, she cried that she wished to get home to her beloved daughter, at the very time that she weakly accepted that which incapacitated her. By and by, the lodgers for the night began to leave the house; and the victim being once more reduced to unconsciousness, they fell to their work in the precise manner they had planned. Hare laid hold of the apertures of breathing, and Burke throwing himself on her body to repress struggles and keep down the ribs, maintained his position till the last sob escaped from the oppressed lungs; and the woman, after a struggle of fully a quarter of an hour, was a corpse. In the evening the body was conveyed to Surgeon’s Square, and ten pounds procured for it.
All this tragedy was being acted while the daughter, at Gilmerton, was waiting anxiously for the return of her mother. The evening had passed without exciting in her much alarm; but when the morning came, with no mother, and no intelligence, she became oppressed with fears. Without having tasted breakfast, she sallied forth. The village was gone through, and afforded no trace. She next directed her steps to Edinburgh, inquiring at every one she met if they had seen a woman of the appearance she described. At length she resorted to the house of the gentleman who paid the pension, but beyond the information that she had been there on the previous day, she could get no satisfaction. She then wandered through all parts of the city, calling on every one she knew, and putting the same question—if they had seen her mother?—but always receiving the same answer. No weariness oppressed her in this vain search. The night set in only as a prelude to the revival of her hopes in the morning; and search followed search, and day followed day, every hour diminishing hope. The time was now counted by weeks, and as these sped, by months, yet ever as the time flew, and the hope decayed, the love increased with every accession of her grief. At length even hope was relinquished, and all speculations were lost in mystery. The only conclusion that could rationally be come to was, that the missing one had wandered by the canal and been drowned; for that a human being could disappear and be for ever lost in the city of Edinburgh, with its humane inhabitants ready to render succour, and its vigilant police ever on the watch, was what no one could conceive. The explanation was to come at a time which, to grief, might be thought long in the future; and such an explanation to a daughter! ay, and a daughter of whom the mother was so proud and so fond.