The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

There are no mysteries of modern London more terrible than its unrecorded ones. There are disappearances that are never chronicled; murders that are never discovered; victims of foul play who go certified to the grave as having succumbed to "natural causes."

If it were realized that scores of people whose death has been accomplished by the hand of the assassin are quietly buried in London cemeteries every year without the slightest suspicion of wrong, the public would be startled. But the fact remains. And its most convincing illustration is that in almost every case where a poisoner has been tried, the exhumation of former wives or relatives who have died in circumstances which the latest revelation makes suspicious, has proved that they were poisoned too.

Fire has its mysteries, which are rarely revealed. Arson is not entirely practised for the sake of the insurance-money. It happens sometimes that there is loss of life. A house has ere now been burnt to the ground to conceal a crime or to secure a death. The murderer makes good his own escape; the victim is found when at last the brave firemen are able to search among the smoking ruins.

The story of "Enoch Arden" is told again and again in our public journals, sometimes with all the pathetic romance that the Laureate wove into his poem, sometimes with the sordid details of threats and blackmail.

But all the husbands and the wives who part and go their separate ways, forget each other and contract other alliances, do not make the circumstances of their chance re-encountering public.

The tragedy has happened ere now in the stalls of a theatre, in a crowded ball-room, in a fashionable restaurant. The supposed dead man has looked carelessly across the room and seen a woman go-white as death as her eyes met his. She has explained to the husband sitting by her side that it was a sudden faintness, and from that hour has had a terror in her heart that has spoilt her life.

There sits in the House of Lords to-day a statesman whose ancestor, following his wife to the grave, met in the churchyard a stranger who had also come to pay the last respect to a dead wife. A strange story was told, and the two husbands stood side by side at the grave, both mourning the same woman.

As it happened then, so it happened in recent years in a great London cemetery. The death of a well-known man appeared in the papers, and in the announcement was the place of interment and the hour of the ceremony.

The widow laid her cross of lilies reverently on the coffin as it was lowered, and turned weeping away; then through the crowd came a woman closely veiled and when the coffin had been lowered dropped upon the lid a little bunch of violets.

She had left her husband for fifteen years and made no sign, and he had married again. But she read of his death in the country town where she was living, and came to the cemetery.