The Stray Waifs
There is no great wonder that thinking people, while admitting ruling motives of action, should be chary about the question of their origin; how one rises out of another, and that out of one further removed, and so forth, as deep down as you please. The harlequin jackets may be removed one after another, till you come to the skin, which, being white, is said to be of no colour, only a negative, as also has been said of black. In another view, the subject appears still more unfruitful; for, as you may bring a tune, combining the grave and the gay, out of one length of catgut, so the human mind will give you off all sorts of feelings, some good and some bad, in the course of the same hour. In truth, as our doings are made up of passions and restraints, which latter may be passions as well, we will never understand thoroughly a human action. When we admit that these great criminals took away lives, right and left, for the sake of money, how much do we achieve? We just accuse them of what the Greeks called chrysomania, or madness for gold. Strange that in our country, where the passion is pretty strong, we have no such name, avarice being entirely different; but this passion may have been a rider on the love of drink, and then we cannot estimate either the one or the other, till we know the force of the countervailing restraints. If these—and there are many—are weak or nil, the passion may be a very weak affair, so that such beings as our principal actors might—seeing they wanted pity and religion and fear—have thought less of suffocating a fellow-creature than Bellarmine did of removing a fly from his face. With no pretension to be teachers, we offer these hints merely as explanatory of our manner of treating a subject much discussed at the time.
Of one thing, however, we may be certain, and that is, the effect of familiarity in removing those inconvenient asperities called scruples, which nature is continually casting up to preserve the triumph of the good over the evil; and so we may well be satisfied that every succeeding success operated with the double effect of confirming the prior purpose and stimulating to a repetition. This is merely the confidence inspired by habit, with which we are all daily cognisant; and therefore the subsequent atrocities ought really to excite less curiosity, though not less revulsion, than those that went before. Yet this is not found to be the case, and the reason is, that even great men in the murdering way are generally content with one trial, as being sufficient for all their power to carry before the judgment-seat of God.
It is always to be remembered that all these moral wonders took place in very quick succession, and only a few weeks pass until we arrive at the waifs. The actors had come to see that they had a great stage to perform on, and supplied as well with innumerable objects. They had only to look a few yards to the west, up Portsburgh, or to the east, up the Grassmarket and Cowgate, to be certain that “a ten pounds,” all prepared, was walking or staggering as if every roll to a side offered to be one into their arms. They had thus reason, if they had been of a philosophical habit,—and one had the poetry of sentiment—to thank the great genius Society for his injustice to his own members. And what an extraordinary injustice it appears, when we consider that the high head of Wealth is upheld by the tax of respect imposed upon the poor and the humble! If there were no inferiors to witness a man’s greatness, he would be great no more; and yet those who are the soil from which this moral grandness springs are left to rot, as if the more it approached to compost the ranker would be the tribute to his mightiness: so, without abating our horror of these men, we cannot altogether forget that the sufferers in most instances were cast away by Mammon to be in turn immolated to Mammon.
They had in short a bank—Heaven knows, not of “elegance”—upon which they could pass a draft when they chose; nor was it forged—they were themselves the drawers, and the money seemed to belong to no one; so careless at that time—it is, we hope, different now—was society of those whom it was bound to look after and protect. So money was again needed, and Burke was to pass the draft, because perhaps his companion thought that as there is (of course) honour among thieves, so fair play must be esteemed a jewel among manslayers. And here the strange circumstance occurred, in the midst of all these strange things, that his draft was to be endorsed by a constable. He had been among his dear friends in the Canongate,—and a man or a woman had now a value for him which a short time before he never dreamt of,—thinking of how he could make some of them more dear to him than they seemed to be to themselves, when his attention was directed to a poor unfortunate, steeped in poverty and drink, in the hands of a police officer. Mixing with the crowd, he went up to the officer, and, with much apparent sympathy, interfered for one who had no home and no friends to care for her. He would furnish that home, at least for a time, and be that friend. The poor woman, like some of the others who had wondered that they should become objects of interest, looked at him as one may be supposed to do who has considered herself past the hope of man’s charity. Some of the crowd, struck with the offer, backed the sympathiser, and the policeman, considering for a little, at last consented, giving her up to the kind friend,—no other than a philanthropist of the humbler order, but perhaps not the less sincere,—and enjoining upon him the due performance of his promise.
Having got his charge, the crowd—whose curiosity was served not less than its benevolence, for these poor people feel intensely for each other’s sorrows, the more by reason that no one else does—separated. Then, alas! the old story. The tempter and the victim pace the streets towards the block-altar of the sacrifice; and as they go, we may consider how many have achieved a world-wide notoriety for having concocted one of these acts, with the attending circumstances of having watched their opportunity and been defeated, and still kept to their purpose, and, veiling all in romantic mystery, at length effected their object. Such men, and their solitary performance, with which they were contented, or to which they were limited by the gallows, are only qualified to form a meagre episode to the terrible drama we are with so much imperfection evolving; even as Faust’s vision rose in curling smoke, and took on the gigantic form of a being out of nature and belonging to another world. We have heard of hardened men who gave those they intended to sacrifice time to pray. There was allowed only short shrift in Log’s lodgings. Before nightfall this woman lay doubled up in a tea-chest. We will not disturb you in your pause as your mind, led by her who dropped pity’s tear on the written words of the recording angel, goes away back to the youth or the maidenhood of this woman. The “perhaps” has a weakness in it, but who shall gainsay, with the doctrine of chances against him, that she was, as you may be, beautiful and good, yea, at one time looking forward to years of happiness, a redeemed’s death, and a Christian’s funeral, even with that confidence which—blessings on your pitiful heart!—will be sanctified and verified to you, because it is in God?
We are not done with the waifs even so far as known, and their number has never been recorded. It was a practice of Burke to wander out in the early mornings. He would have been seen pacing the solitude of the deserted streets even before cock-crow. Nor could any man tell the reason: it was not asked, not even speculated upon. Like the traces of sympathetic ink, the notice lay unverified, till the great disclosure, when it came up fresh into many minds. And it came up all at once, with the suspicion that he did not go those solitary rounds for contemplation, far less from remorse; a feeling which, so far as can be ascertained—for the pang of the wistful look of the dumb boy was suspected to be a mere trick of the prison confessional—never ruffled his pillow. The night-hawk goes to bed in the early morning, before the choir offer their song to the rising sun, and these catch no flies till he is far up in the heavens. The first surmise of the discovery of what had been doing in Log’s lodgings sprang the suspicion with elastic rapidity, that these early walks were undertaken in prosecution of the old purpose, and specially stimulated by an interest in that institution—to be found, we believe, nowhere else—the cinder-women;[8] not singing-birds these, if he was not a night-hawk; but the osprey is as early on the long sands, when there is not to be seen there a living thing, except the gulls, as they pace so securely the edge of the sea.
A very early riser in Edinburgh is impressed with the sight of these thin, haggard figures flitting from backet to backet in the great solitude. The only moving creatures in the long streets,—if you did not know they had any other object in view,—you would think that, being immured in the dark dens of the Old Town, and ashamed to shew their faces during the day, they crawl out to get a glimpse of their old haunts, where, as unfortunates, (the greater number,) they once flaunted their charms, till they faded to the point of recoil. You would say, too, that they belonged neither to this world nor any other—mere pendencies, with no solidity to keep them on the earth, and no wings to take them from it—hopeless, too, and fearless, not from despair or passion, but from sheer inanity—glimmers, not lights, flickering at the end of wicks, with no oil except what they have imbibed long before. It was this prey that brought the prowler out so early in the morning; and he might have revelled in a field so fruitful long enough, without that risk of discovery which attended his other assaults. Friendless as they are, with years intervening since they were cast off, not only from society, but from those who once knew them,—some worshippers of beauty, perhaps,—there were none to inquire after them, scarcely any to miss them, except a sister straggler, who might wonder for a moment why a shadow had disappeared.