The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

Still, she cannot expect that it will be looked on by strangers—not always by its own kith and kin—with the eyes of love through which she sees it, and so there is a portion of the dwelling-place set apart—a room, or rooms, where no one but herself and one trusted attendant ever enters.

There the sufferer lives, cut off from the world—a prisoner, in a sense—and passes from childhood to youth, sometimes from youth to middle-age, its very existence unknown to the friends who from time to time visit the house and join the family circle.

Because the secret is so carefully guarded, this phase of our poor humanity is unfamiliar to us. Its existence is hardly suspected. But it is the lifelong sorrow in many a home that the world thinks a happy one.

When the sorrow is that of a noble family, and the afflicted one is the heir to a proud name and a vast estate, we hear of it. The secret cannot in such circumstances always be guarded. A whisper of it is certain to get about. But with those less conspicuously before the world the secret may be kept until the grave hides it for ever.

Into the more painful—I will not say repulsive—phase of this subject I do not desire to enter; it is right that that which shocks and horrifies should be kept from the public gaze.

But on certain phases which are sad and pathetic, without being repulsive, it may be permissible to dwell for a moment.

From his vast establishment in the City a prosperous merchant returns nightly to his beautiful home in the environs of London. He is a widower with four grown-up daughters. He receives no company. Every evening he dines alone with his daughters. All four are deaf mutes, and the dinner-party is one of unbroken silence. He has never heard the sound of his children's voices. They have never heard a word that fell from his lips. He does not talk of his trouble. Few people, except his near relatives, know of it. It is a family secret carefully guarded. These deaf mutes are women, the youngest is five-and-twenty. They will never marry. To the end of his days the prosperous city merchant will live his family life with the four daughters, who can neither hear nor speak.

As I write I think of another home I know, in which the father and mother have three children to keep them company, to listen to them, to talk with them, to share in the family joys and sorrows. But these children, though they have not been separated for a single day, have never seen each other. They are all blind.

There is a gentle lady with silvered hair, renowned for her charity and the good use she has made of the wealth her husband left her. You will see her wherever she goes accompanied by her two daughters. There is a third, who is the eldest. But the eldest daughter is never seen. Even those who are privileged visitors to the house are not aware of her existence. She is five-and-thirty. But when there are no visitors, and she comes and sits with her mother and sisters, this woman of five-and-thirty behaves like a child of seven. She nurses a doll. She is fitful and wayward as a child, and has naughty childish ways. She is spoken to as a child, caressed as a child, reproved as a child.

Hers is a strange and peculiar case. Her mental development ceased when she attained the age of seven. Her body became that of a woman, her brain remained that of a child. She reads books intended for the nursery. She cries like a child at a trivial ill. I have seen few sights more pathetic than this woman of five-and-thirty, her dark hair prematurely streaked with grey, nursing her doll and reading the stories in the child's picture-book that is sometimes given to her to keep her quiet.