The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

"M. E. C. P. Last wish of M. E. W. Have not betrayed."

The story of the murder of Mrs. Hogg was only half told. Mrs. Pearcy practically acknowledged her guilt when she said that her sentence was just; but there was always an unfathomed mystery in the case which was intensified by the last request of the woman on the brink of eternity, that someone in a foreign land should be notified that she had "not betrayed."

Yet innocent persons have suffered for others and have not betrayed. An innocent man has stood in the shadow of the scaffold and refused to say the words which would have cleared him, because they would have imperilled the life of one whom he was determined not to betray.

Innocent men and innocent women have confessed to crimes and paid the penalty. The story told by the French novelist of the man in the last stage of consumption who confessed to a murder by arrangement with the relatives of the real murderer has its counterpart in fact. The man, who proved that truth is stranger than fiction, feared a public trial. He committed suicide, and left a confession behind him which tallied with all the ascertained facts. His confession could well bear the impress of truth, for the details were communicated to him by the actual author of the crime. The man took the eternal shame upon himself for a sum of money assured to those who, had he died of the disease that must soon have been fatal, would have been left in the direst poverty. It was not until some years after the suicide of the supposed murderer that suspicion was aroused as to the genuineness of the confession by certain circumstances which came accidentally to the knowledge of a retired police-officer. And then it was useless to move further in the matter. To obtain the conviction of another man would, in the circumstances, have been almost impossible.

In the old days physical torture wrung a false confession of guilt from hundreds of men and women. To-day it is mental torture that now and again causes an innocent person to plead guilty to crimes that can be purged with imprisonment, but more frequently there is a solid and substantial benefit as the temptation.

Occasionally, when in some famous case of elaborate fraud there is a suspicion that the person arrested is a man of good family fallen into evil ways, there is a hint in the Press of the mystery of identity. But it is rarely more than a hint. No one knows the truth but the unhappy man himself and his still unhappier relatives, who throughout the trial are in terror lest the accused should, in a moment of weakness, betray himself, and fix the shame of his evil-doings upon the name they bear.

But, as a rule, the well-born man who has fallen low respects his family, and the mystery of the identity of many a criminal who passes from the dock to the convict gaol has been as well preserved, as far as the great public are concerned, as the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask.

One reads old stories of women who all their lives have passed without suspicion as men, and accepts them as possible in the past. But sometimes the world is startled by the discovery that this mystery of sex is still maintained by women even in the lowlier walks of life, where one would think romance of the kind would have no place.

Not long since a working-man, grey-haired and wrinkled, came before a London magistrate, and was proved to be a woman. She had passed as a man and laboured as a man for nearly forty years, and no one had suspected the truth.

In some cases, for good and sufficient reasons, this form of fraud—for in a sense it is fraud—is aided and abetted by relatives, who keep the secret to the end.