These measures were taken as they had been resolved upon, and here it behoves us, for a reason which may appear by and by, to be so particular as to say, that the officer was to come in the morning after breakfast to convey the alleged culprit to the office of the public prosecutor, for the purpose, in the first place, of examination. Nor was Mary unprepared, nay, she was not even to all appearance very much put about, for she had gone about her work as usual, and having finished what she had to do as maid-of-all-work—cook, scullery-maid, and scrub—she began to make preparations for cutting-up and gutting, and scraping, and washing the large cod, which lay upon the dresser ready for these operations, and which, by the way, Mrs Warrender had that morning, an hour before, bought for the sum of one and sixpence, from a Jenny Mucklebacket, of the village of Newhaven—another particular fact which we are bound to apologise for on the foresaid plea of necessity, lest we might incur the charge of wishing to produce an effect by Dutch painting. But Mary’s services as to the cod were dispensed with by Mrs Warrender, if they were not actually resented as either a bribe to forego the prosecution, or a cold-blooded indifference assumed for the purpose of showing her innocence. And so when the officer came Mary was hurried away to undergo this terrible ordeal, which, whatever other effect it might have, could not fail to leave her marked with the very burning irons that might not inflict the punishment due to robbery.
Leaving Mrs Warrender with the cod, which is as indispensable to our legend as a frying-pan to a Dutch interior, or the bone of a pig to a saint’s legend, we follow the prisoner to the office of the man who is a terror to evil-doers. Mr Warrender was there as the private prosecutor, and Isabella as a witness, or rather the witness. On being seated, the fiscal asked Mary, whether, on the day of the bathing, she had not seen the said ring on the finger of her young mistress; whereto Mary answered in the affirmative. Then came the application of the Lydian stone, in the form of the question, whether she did not, at the foresaid time and place, abstract the said ring from the finger of Isabella when she held her hand in the process of dipping; but Mary was here negative and firm, asserting that she did not, and giving emphasis to her denial by adding, that God knew she was as innocent as the foresaid babe. In spite of all which, Isabella insisted that she had been robbed in the manner set forth. The fiscal saw at once that the whole case lay between the two young women, and recommended Mr Warrender to let go the prosecution as one which must fail for defect of evidence; but that gentleman, for the reason that he had so far committed himself, and also for that he was annoyed at what he called the impudence of a servant disputing the word of his daughter, and calling her, in effect, a liar, insisted upon his right, as the protector and curator of his daughter, of having the culprit committed to jail, in the expectation that, through some medium of the three magic balls, or otherwise, he would get more evidence of the crime. The fiscal had no alternative; and so Mary Mochrie was taken to the Tolbooth, with the ordinary result, in the first place, of the news going up and down the long street which then formed the city, that Mrs Warrender’s servant was imprisoned for the strange crime of abstracting from Miss Warrender’s finger, while bathing, the love-token given to her by her intended. There was, doubtless, about the tale just so much of romance that would serve it as wings to carry it wherever gossip was acceptable—and we would like to know where in that city it was not acceptable then, and where it is not acceptable now.
Meanwhile Mrs Warrender had been very busy with the mute person of our drama—the cod—in which, like the devil in the story who had bargained for a sinner and having got a saint instead, had half resolved to follow the advice of Burns and “take a thought and mend,” she had got so much more than she bargained for with the fishwife that she was, when Mr Warrender and Isabella entered, ready to faint. They found her sitting in a chair scarcely able to move, under no less an agency than the fear of God. Her breath came and went with difficulty through lips with that degree of paleness which lips have a special tendency to take on, an expression of awe was over her face, and in her hand she held that identical ruby ring for the supposed theft of which the unfortunate Mary had been hurried to jail, and as for being able to speak she was as mute as the flounder in the proverb that never spoke but once; all she could do was to hold up the ring and point to the cod upon the dresser. But all in vain, for Mr Warrender could not see through the terrible mystery, nay, surely the most wonderful thing that had ever happened in this lower world since the time when the whale cast up Jonah just where and when he was wanted, till at length Mrs Warrender was enabled to utter a few broken words to the effect that the ring had been found in the stomach of the fish. Then, to be sure, all was plain enough—the cod was a chosen instrument in the hands of the great Author of Justice sent by a special message to save Mary Mochrie from the ruin which awaited her under a false charge. The conviction was easy in proportion to the charm which supernaturalism always holds over man—
“True miracles are more believed
The more they cannot be conceived;”
and we are to remember that the last witch had not been burnt at the time of our story. But what made this Divine interposition the more serious to the house of the Warrenders, the message from above was sent as direct as a letter by post, only not prepaid, for Mrs Warrender had paid for the fish; and so it was equally plain that a duty was thus put upon Mr Warrender of no ordinary kind.
Nor was he long in obeying the command. Taking the wonderful ring along with him he hurried away to the office he had so lately left, and told the miraculous tale to the man of prosecutions. And what although that astute personage smiled at the story, just as if he would have said, if he had thought it worth his while, “Was there any opportunity for Mary Mochrie handling the cod?”—it was only the small whipcord of scepticism applied to the posteriors of the rhinoceros of superstition, even that instinct in poor man to be eternally looking up into the blank sky for special providences. So Mr Warrender, now himself a holy instrument, got what he wanted—an order to the jailer for Mary’s liberation. So away he went; and as he went to the Tolbooth he told every acquaintance he met the exciting story—among others his own clergyman of the Greyfriars, who held up his hands and said, “Wonderful are the ways of God! Yea, this very thing hath a purpose in it, even that of utterly demolishing that arch sceptic David Hume’s soul-destroying Essay on Miracles. I will verily take up the subject the next Sabbath.” And thus, dropping the germs as he went, which formed a revolving radius line from the centre of the mystery—his own house—the consequence was that the miracle of the cod went like wildfire wherever there was the fuel of a predisposing superstition; and where, we repeat, was that not then? where is not now, despite of David with all his genius—the first and best of the anti-Positivists, because he was a true Pyrrhonean. Having got to the jail, Mr Warrender informed Mary of this wonderful turn of providence in her favour, whereat Mary, as a matter of course, held up her hands in great wonder and admiration.
But Mr Warrender was not, by this act of justice, yet done with Mary. It behoved him to take her home and restore her to her place, with a character not only cleared of all imputation, but illustrated by the shining light of the favour of Heaven; and so he accompanied her down the thronged High Street,—an act which partook somewhat of the procession of a saint, whereat people stared; nay, many who had heard of the miracle went up and shook hands with one who was the favourite of the Great Disposer of events. Nor did her honours end with this display; for when they reached the house they found it filled with acquaintances, and even strangers, all anxious to see the wonderful fish, and the ring, and the maid. In the midst of all which honours Mary looked as simple as a Madonna; and if she winked it was only with one eye, and the winking was to herself. Even here her honours that day did not terminate, for she behoved for once to dine with the family—not on the cod, which was reserved as something sacred, like the small fishes offered by the Phaselites to their gods—but on a jolly leg of lamb, as a recompense for the breakfast of which she had that morning been deprived. Nay, as for the cod, in place of being eaten, it stood a risk of being pickled, and carried off to help the exchequer of some poor Catholic community in the land of miracles.
But probably the most wonderful part of our history consists in this fact, that no one ever hinted at the propriety of having recourse to the easiest and most natural way of solving a knot so easily tied; but we have only to remember another mystery—that of the gullibility of man when under the hunger of superstition. Nor need we say that the maw of a cod, big and omnivorous as it is, never equalled that of the miracle-devourer’s, possessing, as it does, too, the peculiarity of keeping so long that which is accepted. Wherein it resembles the purse of the miser, the click of the spring of which is the sign of perpetual imprisonment. We only hear the subsequent jingle of the coin, and the jingle in our present instance might have lasted for twenty years, during all which time Mary Mochrie’s miracle might have served as the best answer to the Essay of the renowned sceptic.
And thus we are brought back to the anecdote with which we set out. The story we have told is, in all its essentials, that which Donald Gorm, David Hume’s barber, treated him to on that morning when he wanted to close up for ever the mouth of the arch sceptic. It is not easy to smile while under the hands of a story-telling barber, for the reason that the contracted muscle runs a risk of being still more contracted by a slice being taken off it by a resolute razor moving in straight lines, so that probably it was not till Donald had finished both the story and the shaving, that David dared to indulge in that good-natured smile with which he used to meet his opponents, even in the teeth of the Gael’s oath, “’Tis a miracle, py Cot,”—a word this latter which, in Donald’s humour, might stand for the word cod, as well as for another too sacred to be here mentioned.