Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 05

by Unknown

On the day of his execution he was as feeble as a child; but the gallows does not admit the plea of illness as an excuse for non-attendance. Emaciated and exhausted, he swooned in the hands of the officers, as they knocked from his limbs the chains that might as well have been applied to the infant that has not yet essayed its first attempt to walk; and, if the necessary time had been allowed for recovering him entirely from these repeated fits, the period comprehended in his sentence might have expired, and he would have been beyond the reach of the law. The executors of justice, themselves the very slaves of form, repudiated all ceremony, and the unfortunate being was carried to the cart, to be roused, by its horrid wheels, from a swoon to the awful consciousness of being in the act of being hurried to the scaffold, which he had not strength to mount, and yet could not escape. The scene that now presented itself was such that many individuals, whose morbid appetite for horror was insatiable, flew from the place of execution, unable to stand and witness the spectacle of a human being falling from one swoon into another, incapable of keeping his feet, and lifted softly, as by the hands of nurses, to receive around his neck the cord that was to strangle him by his own weight. Yet I was forced to witness this sight; for, by a strange contradiction of duties, I was called upon to attend the patient, and, by the use of stimulants, to render him susceptible of the pangs of death. Yet what was my art, my medicaments, to those of the executioner of the last act of the law, whose quick and sudden jerk ended in a moment life, disease, terror, and all the ills coiled up in the mortal frame of miserable man!

The circumstances attending the execution of Walter T—— (though not the condemnation, which was reckoned just), were such as to rouse considerably the public attention, and the prints of that day were filled with disquisitions as to the expediency of wounding the feelings of a nation, by executing a man in a situation of mind and body calculated to excite pity and commiseration, and to exclude the feeling of satisfaction which ought to follow the punishment of the most heinous of all crimes. Yet all this was plainly absurd; for, if punishments were to wait the bodily condition of malefactors, the art of man would soon cheat the gallows of its dues, and retribution would be the stalking-horse of deceit. The unusual sufferings of this individual were commemorated in a manner very different from the ephemeral columns of daily prints; for Dr. ——, to whom his body, conform to the sentence, was delivered for dissection, anatomized it; and two years after, I purchased from him, for the price of fifteen guineas, the entire skeleton, to supply a want in my museum, and facilitate the osteological studies of my apprentices.

During the twenty years that passed after the period of his execution, I seldom cast my eyes upon that dry crackling memorial of the unhappy man, as it hung in grim majesty and stoical defiance of the changes of time, and of those exacerbations of passion which, in its animated condition, penetrated its very marrow, without a cold shivering remembrance of his sufferings. On the patella or knee-pan of the left limb there was written, by Dr. ——, who constructed the skeleton, the words "Walter T——, a murderer, executed at ——, the — day of ——." I wrote, on the patella of the other limb—"For the extraordinary circumstances attending his execution, see the —— newspaper, published on the same day;" and I retained a copy of the print in my museum, to gratify the curiosity of those who might be interested in the fate of the being whose bones, as they crackled to the touch, sung that peculiar and heart-striking memento mori, which few people, not professionally interested in the sight, can hear and forget. The indescribable interest produced by a skeleton is well known, among anatomists, to produce in young students a peculiar facility in acquiring a knowledge of the immense number of bones, many of them bearing long Greek names, which go to make up the aggregate of the human system; but the fate of Walter T——, which I always communicated to my apprentices, adding the part I myself acted in the dark drama, imparted a peculiar interest to the grim spectacle, which no memory, however treacherous, could, even with the assistance of years, disregard or renounce.

For a period of fifteen years after the execution of that unfortunate man, my avocations did not lead me into any correspondence of a professional character with the individuals who resided at the house of Mr. T——, the murdered man; but I understood generally, though I could not now tell how I got the intelligence, that William B——, his nephew, having succeeded to the deceased's effects, occupied his house, had got married, and had a large family of children. About the month of December, in the year ——, I was, however, called again to the same house in the fir planting, into which I had not been since that night on which I witnessed the death-struggles of its former proprietor. The emergency which now took me there, was the illness of William B——, who had been seized with that disease called tic doloureux, perhaps the most excruciating of all the ailments incident to the human frame. We are entirely ignorant of its causes, whether procatartic or proximate—all we can say of it being, that it is an affection of the nerves of the face, and particularly of that branch of the fifth pair which comes out at an aperture below the orbit; and that it is attended with such pain—coming on in an instant, generally without premonitory warning—that the devoted victim of its cruelty is often thrown on his back on the floor, where he lies, during the existence of the attack, in a state even beyond what can be figured of the wildest exacerbation of fevered frenzy. I have seen a strong man, who could have stood unappalled before a cannon mouth in the field of battle, running about like a madman, as he felt some internal monitor (a peculiarity in his case) telling him that an attack was coming on—holding out his hands, crying wildly for help, or as if he had been flying from the clutches of a hundred demons, and, in a moment after, laid on his back, in the full grasp of the relentless tormentor, uttering the most heart-rending screams, and requiring the power of several people to hold him down.

Under an attack of this frightful complaint, I found William B——, who, being in the clutch of a paroxysm, was scarcely conscious of my presence. He was extended on his back on a sofa; his fingers were (according to the practice of these victims) pressed on that part of the face where the pain shoots from; sharp cries, keeping pace with the intermitting pangs, were wrung reluctantly from him, filled the house, and might have been heard beyond it; his limbs were restless, striking the foot and sides of the couch, and sometimes dashing them as if he would have broken and destroyed all resisting objects; his eye glanced fiercely around, as if he disdained the supplication of mortal aid in so hopeless a cause. I knew the nature of the disease too well to hope to be able to do him, at that time, any service; the patient himself, by the pressure he was applying to the seat of the pain, was doing all that could be done to ameliorate his sufferings; and, having told his wife that I could be of greater use to him at a time when the pain was off him, I left him, with the intention of calling again, to suggest the application of the only remedy yet known for this complaint.

In a few days, accordingly, I called again, and found the patient recovered from a new attack which had come on during the previous night. He was greatly exhausted, looked pale and anxious, and dreaded intensely another paroxysm, which he said he could not be able to bear. He endeavoured to describe to me his feelings, when the disease arrived at its greatest height, and correctly distinguished between those neuralgic pains, and the fiercest of those that attack the viscera and muscles; bringing out, in his unprofessional language, what I have witnessed, that there is often a power felt by the sufferer of resisting, by some indescribable internal process, the latter kind of pain, while, in the former (and the tic doloureux is the worst species), the victim is conscious of no power within himself of even bearing—all his energies, thoughts, and stoical resolutions being put to flight and routed by the fierce, lancinating, burning pangs; and even despair, the ordinary refuge of the miserable, seems to deny the tortured spirit the grim relief of its dark haven.

As the patient proceeded in his description, he occasionally drew deep sighs, looked despairingly, and shuddered—all symptoms of the complaint from which he had suffered so much, and might still suffer; and, after a pause, he asked me, with a timid look, if the disease was known to medical men, or if I thought it peculiar to him. I replied that the complaint was well known, and very far from being uncommon; but that, unfortunately, we had not very many remedies to which we could resort or trust for a cure. He looked as if he did not believe me, or doubted my statement, and then asked what the best remedy was. I answered that it was an operation, whereby we divided a part of the facial nerve; and recommended to him the trial of that experiment, for as yet we could not pronounce certainly of its efficacy. He did not seem to be inclined to go into my views; and I asked him if he feared the pain of the operation, and yet dared to face that of his disease, which was a thousand times greater. He replied that he cared nothing for the pain of the operation; but yet he felt that he could not undergo it. I looked at him with surprise, and requested an explanation; but he answered me by the question—"Are we not sometimes bound to bear pain?" And, as he uttered these words, he seemed to feel great distress. I replied that I thought we were bound rather to get quit of pain by every means in our power, and that all mankind acted on that principle—a circumstance to which my profession owed its existence and success.

"But if this extraordinary, this miraculous pain is not sent for some purpose," he said, "why is it that, the moment I think of removing it, an attack comes upon me?" I cannot explain that, I replied; and he then went on. "The last time you were sent for, I was seized, after my wife despatched you the message; and now," holding up his hand, "behold it comes again, the very instant I begin to talk of a remedy! Yet I must suffer—it is ordained that I must suffer—it is right and just that I should suffer. Welcome, ye dreadful messenger whom I fear and tremble at, yet love! You see, sir, he comes!"

The unhappy man spoke truth: an attack of his disease came on him at that moment, and he fell back on the couch, screaming, and pressing, with all his force, his hand against the seat from which the pains lancinated through the bones and muscles of his face. His cries brought his wife to his assistance; but it is one of the characteristics of this disease, that assistants and comforters can only look on and weep, so utterly does it defy and mock all human efforts. I left him in the charge of his wife, to whom I gave some directions, rather to revive her hope and remove from her countenance a painful anxiety that clouded it, than with any hope of affording relief. As I proceeded through the planting in which the house was situated, I heard his cries for some distance; and, while I pitied the victim, called up into my mind his sentiments, which struck me as being peculiar and mysterious. His conviction of some connection between an attack of his complaint and his attempt to get it removed, was clearly a fancy; yet the existence of such an idea indicated something wrong either in his mind or conscience—even with the admission that a pain so extraordinary might itself suggest, to a sober-minded man, some thoughts of Divine retribution, where there was no crime to be expiated of a deeper die than the most of mankind are in the habit of committing.

Whatever might be the ground of the delusion under which the patient laboured, it was necessary, at all events, to remove the notion that an effort to cure the disease had any supposed mysterious connection with an attack; the best way of accomplishing which was to hold forth, by calling and applying remedial processes, the handle of an occasion to the unseen power to make the attack, which, if not taken advantage of (and who could suppose it would?) might expose the absurdity of his suspicion or conviction. I accordingly called again next day, and observed, as I entered, that the patient's eye scanned me with a look as eloquent as words, that I had brought with me another attack of his complaint. I ascertained that he had not had an attack since the one I witnessed, and then told him, that, as he would not consent to allow the nerve to be severed, I had brought a lotion which might prove efficacious, if applied to the diseased parts in the manner I explained to him. I held out to him the bottle, but he looked at it with fear, and said, he could not, he dared not take it.