She saw at a glance that I had not been to bed. I did not like to communicate my experience to her, but the day following I saw in the daily papers the account of the escape of a lunatic from the Dundrum Criminal Lunatic Asylum. The description, save as to the clothes, tallied with that of the old man. There was a further announcement stating that he had been found wandering in the direction of Enniskerry, and had been brought back to the asylum.
It so happened that I knew one of the physicians that attended the Dundrum Institution, and when I met him a few days after, without giving him any hint of my acquaintance with the object of my inquiry, asked him what he knew concerning the old man, and suggested that my curiosity had been aroused solely by the account of the escape which appeared in the newspapers.
“It is a very sad story,” he said. “The old man has been confined for over forty years for a terrible crime committed when he was a young man of about five-and-twenty. He was enamoured of a lady, whose love he believed he had secured. She had accepted him, and they were to have been married in a few months. Rumours were brought to him that the lady was listening to the whispers of another suitor. He soon discovered that the rumours were well founded. The fiercest jealousy completely took possession of him, and undoubtedly deprived him of his senses, he one day surprised the pair, sitting together beneath a tree on the banks of a stream not far from the lady’s house, beside which he and she had often wandered before their vows were plighted. Stung to ungovernable rage by this sight, he killed the young man, gashing his throat with a knife in the most shocking manner. The lady was unharmed; but the tragedy took away her reason, and she died within a few months of the dreadful occurrence. The murderer made no attempt to deny his crime; on the contrary, he talked about it freely to anyone who would listen. He was tried, and, of course, convicted; but the Lord Lieutenant, being satisfied that the wretched man was insane, commuted his sentence, and it was ordered that he should be kept in confinement during Her Majesty’s pleasure. As a rule he is very gentle, but sometimes—and always at night—he becomes very violent, and the attendants have to be on their guard against him.”
“It is, indeed,” said I, “a sad story.”
THE PRETTY QUAKERESS.
I was just about twenty years of age. I had entered Trinity three years before, and had fallen in with a Roystering set. In those days the fights between the college lads and the townsfolk were more frequent and furious than they have been of recent years, and I took my share of the cuts and bruises that were almost always the portion of the combatants on either side. On one occasion when we had a pretty stiff battle with the butcher boys from around St. Patrick’s, I was felled by a blow. In the crush I was unable to rise, and would have been in a fair way of being trampled out of existence but for the gallant exertions of one of my companions, Jack Langrishe. He fought like a devil, and, knocking over his nearest foes, cleared a space which enabled me to get up.
Jack, in trying to save me, got an ugly cut on his left arm, which cost him some trouble. The butchers were put to flight, and Jack carried off as a trophy a villainous looking knife which he had captured from one of his assailants. Intimate as we had been before, the service which he had rendered to me made us just sworn friends for life, and I felt bound to do him any service it was in my power to render him.