Emmet’s strong slight frame had stood the long ordeal perfectly, and his mood had wings. He whispered cheerfully through the grating: “I shall be hanged to-morrow!” as he passed John Hickson’s cell on his way back to his own.
We know he read the Litany there; and he also indulged a turn for secular, and even profane employment. In fact, it pleased Mr. Robert Emmet to draw himself (he drew exquisitely) as a posthumous serial in two parts. Some one found and recognised the grim R. E., head, the disconcerted R. E., body, on separate scraps of paper: they lay on his little table, when all was over, witnesses to the detached humour possible to an easy conscience. His industry was great during the few remaining hours. He possessed a lock of his absent Sarah’s hair, which she may have given him years before: this he wished to wear in his dying hour. As he sat plaiting it minutely, and tenderly fastening it into the fold of his velvet stock, he was noticed and questioned. Fearing that the treasure might be taken from him, he said that his occupation was “an innocent one.” The only persons allowed to see him were the chaplains and M’Nally, the fine flower of infamy, happy in Government pay, who to the end played with success the part of the assiduous friend. It was he who brought to Emmet on his final morning the news, then ten days old, of his mother’s death. The son took it, as he took all his losses, with what Mr. W. H. Curran briefly calls his “unostentatious fortitude.” After an instant of silence he looked up and found his voice. “It is better so,” he answered quietly. Her delicate proud heart had broken at the menace hanging over her darling: that much he had divined at once. She had written, during that last year, that she was “a parent supremely blest” in the virtues and dispositions of her children.
Mr. M’Nally was intimate with Mr. Curran, for whom he had an affection as genuine as he was capable of feeling. It was like “Janus” Wainewright’s affection for Charles Lamb, and as exempt from the poison-cup otherwise dealt impartially to divers and sundry. It is possible, therefore, that Mr. M’Nally chose to acquaint his much-deceived client with the true state of Sarah’s health: a life-in-death which also was surely “better so.” But this is mere conjecture, as Emmet would never have inquired; rather than name his “nut-brown maid,” the truly “banished man” would still have endured all the inner turmoil of lonely love,
“—surges
Which wash both Heaven and Hell.”
No credit need be given to the tale that as Emmet went forth to his death through the Dublin streets, a young lady, believed to be Miss Curran, was seen in a carriage despairingly taking leave of him, and fluttering a handkerchief until he was out of sight, when she sank in a swoon. It is not the fashion of persons of deep feeling, save on the stage, to have recourse at solemn moments to fluttering handkerchiefs. If any young lady interested in Robert Emmet were abroad in a carriage on that autumn morning, it would be his only sister, Mrs. Holmes, fated to outlive him but one melancholy year. As for poor lovely Sarah, she had disappeared like an underground stream during his last weeks and days, ever since her letters were seized as spoils of war. Major Sirr is believed to have destroyed them all, in due course, not without a flow of tears! The sweet lady was indeed an object of pity; and Emmet, putting in never a stroke of conscious work, had a most unaccountable faculty for melting hearts. The reign of Sensibility was not over; able-bodied persons in 1803 were only beginning to be carried out of the pit, more dead than alive, when Mrs. Siddons played. But something in Emmet’s uncomplaining presence overcame stern men habituated to political offenders. The honest turnkey at Kilmainham fell fainting at his feet, only to hear the affectionately-proffered good-bye; and it was generally noticed that Lord Norbury, facing him, could with difficulty steady his voice, though he was popularly believed to revel in pronouncing capital sentence.
Emmet busied himself with letters in his cell. He slept and ate as usual; and his firm handwriting witnessed the unshaken soul within. Several of his last letters have been recovered; two or three have been published, in Mr. W. H. Curran’s Life of his illustrious father, in Dr. Madden’s moving but chaotic Memoirs of the United Irishmen, and elsewhere. On the day set for his execution Robert Emmet wrote to his old friend Richard Curran:—
“My dearest Richard: I find I have but a few hours to live; but if it was the last moment, and the power of utterance was leaving me, I would thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generous expressions of affection and forgiveness to me. If there was any one in the world in whose breast my death might be supposed not to stifle every spark of resentment, it might be you. I have deeply injured you; I have injured the happiness of a sister that you love, and who was formed to give happiness to every one about her, instead of having her own mind a prey to affliction. Oh, Richard! I have no excuse to offer, but that I meant the reverse: I intended as much happiness for Sarah as the most ardent love could have given her. I never did tell you how much I idolised her. It was not with a wild or unfounded passion, but it was an attachment increasing every hour, from an admiration of the purity of her mind, and respect for her talents. I did dwell in secret upon the prospect of our union; I did hope that success, while it afforded the opportunity of our union, might be a means of confirming an attachment which misfortune had called forth. I did not look to honours for myself; praise I would have asked from the lips of no man: but I would have wished to read, in the glow of Sarah’s countenance, that her husband was respected. My love, Sarah! it was not thus that I thought to have requited your affection. I did hope to be a prop round which your affections might have clung, and which would never have been shaken; but a rude blast has snapped it, and they have fallen over a grave. This is no time for affliction. I have had public motives to sustain my mind, and I have not suffered it to sink; but there have been moments in my imprisonment when my mind was so sunk by grief on her account that death would have been a refuge. God bless you, my dearest Richard. I am obliged to leave off immediately. Robert Emmet.”
This touching letter has been printed before, but the two which follow, long lost and newly found, have never been made public. The original letters seem to have disappeared. The contemporary copies figure in the Hardwicke or Wimpole collection, which has very recently been made accessible to readers by the issue of the current Catalogue of Additional Manuscripts at the British Museum. The shorter of them was intended by Emmet for Thomas Addis Emmet and his wife Jane Patten, his brother and sister-in-law. With it was sent a long historical document, called An Account of the late Plan of Insurrection in Dublin, and the Causes of its Failure. Hurriedly penned, in order to give the beloved relatives a unique and direct knowledge of all that the writer had meant and missed, it is a masterly detailed statement, as free from all traces of morbidity, or even of agitation, as if it had been drawn up “on happy mornings with a morning heart,” in the tents of victory. Thanks to the practised duplicity of Dr. Trevor, to whose care it was confided, Mr. Thomas Addis Emmet, then in Paris, never received it; he complained bitterly of its suppression, and was only towards the close of his life enabled to read it through the medium of the press. But neither he nor any of his American descendants, inclusive of the distinguished compiler of the quarto, privately printed in New York, entitled The Emmet Family, seems to have suspected the existence of the little personal note in which the Account was enclosed. The official draft of it figures in Hard. MS. 35,742, f. 197:—