Motives for disappearance—Was he John Sadleir?—Swallowed up— A tragedy that came to light—How a body can be disposed of— Startling evidence—The ease of a secret burial
EVERY year a certain number of men and women disappear suddenly from their homes, from their accustomed haunts, from the circle of their friends and acquaintances. Without cause, without any reason that can be surmised, they vanish; and the fate of many of them remains an unsolved mystery to the last.
Scarcely a week passes that the newspaper reader does not see the headline "Mysterious disappearance." Now and again it is a man of mature age, married, the father of a family, and in good circumstances. But more frequently it is a young woman.
A large number of these disappearances are soon accounted for, thanks to the vast circulation of our modern newspapers and their custom of reproducing a photograph of the missing person.
The young woman who disappears from London is discovered living quietly at the seaside or in some provincial town. The fact that Miss So-and-so has been found is duly chronicled, and the public trouble no more about the matter.
The mystery has probably been no mystery at all to the relatives of the wanderer. In some cases melancholia, in others a family disagreement, has preceded the foolish act. Disappointment in love, or unhappiness at home, occasionally financial embarrassment, has been the cause of the adventure. These are the ordinary, everyday disappearances, which mean only the waywardness or the wilfulness of the individual.
But the number of disappearances which justify the use in every sense of the word "mysterious" is still great. A man drops suddenly out of life. He was, and in a moment he is not. He has vanished as though by magic, and there is nothing to indicate that the act of disappearance has been a voluntary one.
The desire to disappear, to drop a life that has its embarrassments, its unpleasantnesses, its limitations, may come to many of us; but there are generally circumstances which make the accomplishment of the desire exceedingly difficult. We are chained by a set of circumstances from which it is impossible to free ourselves without incurring consequences which may be disastrous, not only to ourselves, but to those we leave in ignorance of our fate.
After calamities in which there has been great loss of life and difficulty in identifying some of the victims, there are always a certain number of people who avail themselves of the opportunity of having their fate conjectured, and never return to their homes.
So it comes about that husbands and wives are mourned as dead, their names, it may be, recorded upon the memorial stone above the family tomb, who are still in the land of the living. Under other names, far from the chance of recognition, they are living new lives with new family ties to replace the old ones they suddenly severed.
That is the mystery of the dead alive, a fascinating subject upon which many a romance has been written. To this day there are people who believe the astounding story told by men who affirmed that they had met Fauntleroy in America after his execution, and it was for a long time the custom to explain that this marvel had happened through the unfortunate banker being hanged with a silver tube in his throat.
On the popular belief that John Sadleir, Member for Sligo, a Junior Lord of the Treasury, Chairman of the London Joint Stock Banking Company, and the most successful swindler of modern times, obtained the body of a man resembling himself, conveyed it to Hampstead Heath, and placed his own silver cream jug with the remains of poison in it beside the corpse, Miss Braddon founded one of her famous novels.
The fact that gave rise to the doubt as to Sadleir's being really dead was this: The body of the supposed Sadleir was found on Hampstead Heath some distance from the roadway or path. It had been a rainy evening, and the heath was sodden. But the soles of the boots the dead man was wearing were clean and unstained with moisture.
Sadleir did not leave his house till nearly midnight, long after the heavy rain had commenced. How did he cross the heath and lie down to poison himself and die without wetting the soles of his boots?
This strange circumstance was recalled when, long after the witnesses before the coroner's jury had identified the body as that of Sadleir, three men who had known him well declared that they had met him on the other side of the Atlantic.
In these instances of the dead alive there is only vague surmise to grasp at. The element of a grim certainty enters into the cases of those who drop out of life to meet an unascertained fate.
A friend of mine—an artist with whom in bygone years it was my privilege to be associated—had a daughter, a charming and beautiful girl of eighteen. She had no love affair or trouble of any kind. One winter evening about seven o'clock her mother wanted some Berlin wool. Close by the house was a shopping street where the wool could be obtained. The girl offered to fetch it for her mother, and went out with a shilling or two in her pocket.
She bought the wool, but she never came back with it. From that hour to this—an interval of seven years—no living soul who knew that beautiful girl has ever set eyes on her again. Every effort to trace her has been in vain. She was seen at the end of the shopping street by a neighbour making her way towards her home. But between the end of that street and the house whose doors she was never to enter again she dropped out of human ken for ever.
One day a man whom I knew—a prosperous suburban tradesman—went into a City office—the office of a firm with whom he had business transactions. He paid an account, and said he should come back late in the afternoon to give an order. He was going to his bank to cash a cheque.
He was seen within a few hundred yards of that bank by an acquaintance, but he never cashed the cheque, and he was never heard of again. For fifteen years his widow refused to abandon hope. She always thought that one day he would come back, and night after night, when the house was closed, she would sit listening for the footstep that she believed one day she should hear again. She is still living. A little while ago I had a letter from her son. "The mystery of my father's fate," he wrote, "is still unsolved."
It is impossible to conclude that this unfortunate man meant to disappear. He would have cashed the cheque had flight been in his mind. Men who intend to live anywhere must have money. The cheque was never presented. For his own personal use he had for weeks previously drawn nothing out of the bank.
What became of him? Was he lured down some byway and murdered for his watch and chain and whatever he had in his pocket, and his body disposed of in the mysterious way that murdered people are got rid of even to this day? Or was it a case of dual identity? Did he, forgetting who he was, think himself some one else, and live and work as some one else in some other part of England until he died in the natural course of events?
That may happen, and does sometimes account for mysterious disappearances.
A man well-known in the theatrical profession some years ago—the touring manager of a popular London lessee—once disappeared mysteriously. His accounts were in order. He had paid the company and remitted the balance to his chief. And having done so he disappeared. The company waited for him at a railway station, and waited in vain. All sorts of conjectures were indulged in, and his friends and relatives were untiring in their efforts to ascertain his fate.
Late one night an actor going home to his residence on the south side of the water turned up a side street, attracted by a little crowd in it. A gang of roughs were around two men who were fighting.
The actor stopped for a moment to "study character," and then went on up the side street, knowing that at the top of it he would get into the main thoroughfare again.
Near the top he came to a public-house. Outside the house a poorly-clad street musician was playing a cornet—none too well—and collecting coppers from the people in the bar. The actor looked at the comet-player for a moment, and then, with a cry of astonishment, touched him on the shoulder and called him by name.
It was the touring manager whose mysterious disappearance had been the talk of the profession.
The poor fellow was absolutely ignorant of his own identity. It was some time afterwards before old familiar surroundings and the voices and faces of old friends revived in his brain the memory of the past and gave him back his lost identity.
It happens sometimes that the mystery of a disappearance is penetrated only to increase the anguish of the unhappy relatives. A young man of good family, becoming heavily involved through gambling transactions, left his home. The efforts of his father to ascertain his whereabouts were fruitless.
Many years afterwards the young man's father, Mr. ————, was at the house of a friend who collected souvenirs of famous crimes. In his collection was an album containing the portraits of murderers and their victims.
Turning over the pages of the album, Mr. ———— uttered an exclamation of terror. "Who is that?" he exclaimed, pointing to the portrait of a young man in the uniform of a private soldier.
"That," said the friend, "was a soldier who shot his sergeant dead in the barrack-yard. He was tried, and it was proved at the trial that he had shown symptoms of insanity before committing the act. He was sent to Broadmoor."
The unhappy father went to the great criminal lunatic asylum, and there found his son a hopeless maniac. He had enlisted under a false name, and under that name had been tried. The father read the case in the papers at the time, but had no idea it was his own son who was being tried for his life.
The secret of many a mysterious disappearance lies buried in the earth, sometimes in cellars, behind brick walls, beneath the flooring of a kitchen or an outhouse, in the garden, in the farmyard. We even know that people who have disappeared mysteriously out of life may be lying securely packed and stored away in a great furniture repository.
Miss Hacker had lain in the coal-cellar that was her grave for two years before chance brought her body to light. Miss Holland might be lying now in the Moat Farm had not Dougal gone to the Bank of England to cash certain notes, the numbers of which had been forwarded to the bank authorities.
When the house of a fashionable physician in the West End of London was being re-drained some years ago, the body of a beautiful girl was discovered buried under the flooring. There was no clue to her identity, and the coroner's verdict was given on the body of "some person unknown."
But there are other ways of disposing of the bodies of people whose mysterious disappearance is due to an act of violence.
William Smith has disappeared. He leaves home in the ordinary way and never returns. There is nothing to account for his disappearance. He was in no difficulty. He was happy in his domestic circumstances. He has taken no money away with him, apparently. Every search is made for him, but no trace of him, living or dead, can be found.
But he has been murdered and buried—buried in a cemetery with the rites of the church, and there is a tombstone above his grave—only somebody else's name is on it.
This is what happened.
A certain person owed him a sum of money, or he was threatening proceedings against a certain person, or for some reason—as in the famous Northumberland Street tragedy—it was to the interest of a certain person to get him into a house and murder him.
The trap was laid. William Smith met his enemy—the enemy invited him to his house, his chambers, or his flat. A sudden blow felled the victim to the ground and killed him.
How could the body be disposed of? The clerk to a Burial Board who gave evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons explains the whole process.
To show that I am not imagining or exaggerating I will give the exact words from the report "ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 15th August and 1st September, 1893." The evidence is given on page 19 of the Select Committee's Report. "You do not want a certificate to bury a body; you can dispose of a body in the London Cemetery without any certificate at all. If any gentleman here was murdered, to put it plainly, and you had a queer undertaker to dispose of that body, he could dispose of it without any one being any the wiser."
"2343. How could he dispose of it?—I will give you an instance. Say I am an undertaker, and I have got the body of a man named William Smith to be buried to-morrow at Finchley, and he is registered all right. A person comes to me at eleven o'clock at night and says, 'I have got a body to get rid of, and I will give you £500 to do it.' The undertaker takes the body he has got to get rid of to Finchley, and buries it as William Smith without a certificate; we send that notice to the registrar, who refers to his book, and finds that it is quite right. Then the undertaker will take the real William Smith to Ilford Cemetery, say, and take the body up there with a certificate, which saves any inquiry being made.
"2344. What does he do with the other body?—He has already taken that up without a certificate to Finchley Cemetery; he buries the body he has got to get rid of at Finchley, and withholds the certificate of William Smith; the authorities then give notice to the registrar that William Smith was buried there, and the certificate was not delivered. The undertaker has that certificate in his possession then, and he can take the original William Smith up to another cemetery, and there they do not trouble, because they get a certificate delivered with the body.
"2345. In that way you think it is very easy to get rid of a body if any one desires to do so?—Yes, unless there was a law passed that no body should be interred without a burial certificate being delivered at the time."
That is the manner in which a murdered body might be disposed of. The friends and relatives would be in complete ignorance of the fate of the man who had disappeared. It would remain for ever a mystery.
No wonder the Committee of the House of Commons embodied this paragraph in their report: "It is a most important duty of society to guard its members against foul play, and it appears to your Committee that so far as may be it should be made impossible for any person to disappear from his place in the community without any satisfactory evidence being obtained of the cause of his disappearance."
All the people who disappear and are never heard of again do not start fresh lives. Many of them are without the means to do so. Some have probably committed suicide. All the people who quietly drop into the Thames do not come to the surface again. Something may happen to prevent the body rising. But for a suicide to remain long a mystery is the exception, not the rule. The suicide does not go out of the way to take precautions against the discovery of the deed. The average person bent on suicide more frequently desires the sympathy which will follow the discovery of the tragedy.
As a matter of fact, romance and crime divide the mysterious disappearances fairly between them, and if there is a balance either way it is in favour of crime.
The person who remains alive after disappearing has a task of the greatest difficulty in these days of photography and illustrated journalism. The odds against being able to avoid discovery are enormous. It is only the dead and buried who are safely out of the way of prying eyes.
And yet there are cases on record of people who have disappeared and been completely lost to their relatives who have never moved five miles away from their home.
James Ferguson, the famous astronomer, was walking one day in the Strand with his daughter. They stopped together to look in a shop window. When Mr. Ferguson moved on to renew his walk, his daughter was nowhere to be seen.
Her fate was a mystery which was only solved long years afterwards when she was discovered dying in a room in a court not many yards from the spot at which she had disappeared.
She had slipped away from her father to meet a lover, and with him she had eloped. He deserted her, and the unhappy girl, after trying to be an actress, and trying to be an authoress, sank to the lowest level, and for three years before she was found dying she had haunted the Strand and had often at night encountered friends and relatives who had not recognized her.
Some years ago, in Bermondsey Workhouse, two old paupers who had been fellow-inmates of the house for fifteen years fell into conversation over their afternoon pipes.
They became reminiscent. "Ah!" said one, "my mother lived in that street"—alluding to one that was then being pulled down. "She was a widow, and I and my brother helped in the shop. One day my brother disappeared. He was seventeen. He went out and we never saw him again—never knew what happened to him."
"He helped your mother in a shop in that street," said the other pauper. "What sort of a shop?"
"A greengrocer's—it was the little shop at the corner."
"What was your brother's name?"
"William Jones."
The other pauper rose and held out his hand.
"Tom!" he exclaimed, "it's wonderful! Here have we two brothers been in this workhouse together for fifteen years and we didn't know each other!"
Then the man told his story. He had got into a bit of trouble about some money with another young man in the neighbourhood, and had been worried about it. So he had said nothing to his mother, but gone away and got a job in another part of London. There he had married and settled down, brought up a family, lost his wife, lost his children, fallen on evil days, and at last became a pauper.
For fifteen years the man who had mysteriously disappeared had been under the same roof as his brother, and neither had known the other.
The old-fashioned housekeeper—A ghost which fought the servant— Jealously guarding the family secret—An adventure while primrose gathering—A silent dinner-party—Dwarfs who live with the children
IN the days of romance the Secret Chamber was part of every mansion that had any claim to antiquity. Every old castle, every nobleman's seat, had in it a room which could be used on an emergency for the stowing away of something or somebody that it was not considered advisable for the visitors or the retainers to see.
Many of these secret chambers still exist, and the families to whom they belong are rather proud of them. The housekeeper who takes you over an ancient seat will conduct you to a room at the end of a passage—sometimes you can approach it through a sliding panel—and tell you in parrot fashion the tragedy connected with it. Occasionally there is a ghost attached to the story, and the housekeeper assures you that many members of the family have seen it.
The gruesomeness of the room in which a murder was committed three hundred years ago is heightened when your guide points to a stain on the floor and tells you that all the processes of modern scrubbing and cleaning have failed to remove it.
There is a house in the North of England which has a secret room, the exact position of which is only revealed to two people—the heir-at-law and the family solicitor. Hundreds of visitors have tried in vain to find it.
There is a country house which has a secret room in which there lives an old lady—a very ghostly old lady, for she died and was buried a hundred years ago. Only on rare occasions does she appear to the other occupants, and then she is attired in an old-fashioned brown dress, with a lace cap on her head and a bunch of keys in her hand.
My friend and collaborator, the late Frederic Clay, went to stay at this house. He knew nothing of the story. After he had been shown to his room to dress for dinner an old lady, attired in brown, and carrying a bunch of keys in her hand, came in.
He thought she was the housekeeper, and said he was quite comfortable and wanted nothing. Then she went away.
At dinner he said to his hostess—a relative: "What a dear old lady your housekeeper is! But what an old-fashioned way she dresses!—she looks as if she had stepped out of an old romance."
There was dead silence at the table. The next morning he learned that the old lady of the secret room had paid him a visit.
That was a modern instance; but most of the stories and tales of old romance are associated with family traditions, and the mystery of them belongs to a day that is long since dead.
But here in the heart of London, in the midst of the traffic of the crowded capital, even where the omnibuses pass the door, there are secret chambers and uncanny sights hidden away from prying eyes.
As a rule the old retainers, the servants who have been with the family for years, share the knowledge; but it is carefully guarded from new-corners.
Not long ago a young servant came to seek a place in London. She had been housemaid at a rectory, and the rector's wife gave her an excellent character. She went to a West End agency, and after a few days she was engaged as third housemaid by a dear, white-headed old lady, who said she was the housekeeper to Lord and Lady ————. The girl went to her situation. The house was in an aristocratic square, and the girl, from what she saw of her surroundings, thought she was fortunate in getting the place.
She had to share a bedroom with another servant, a middle-aged woman, who had been with the family for many years.
In the middle of the night the country girl was aroused by a strange sound. She started up. The moonlight streaming in through the window fell upon a tall, gaunt woman with dishevelled hair, who was standing at the foot of the bed.
The girl uttered a cry, and the servant sleeping in the same room woke up and sprang out of bed. She seized the "apparition" by the arms and held her. In a moment another woman, partially dressed, entered the room, and the two dragged the "apparition," fighting and screaming, out into the passage.
When her fellow-servant returned, the girl, who was paralyzed with fear, asked her what had happened.
"Nothing," was the reply. "I thought I heard one of the girls in the other room calling out, and I went to see if she was ill."
"But I saw a woman—a woman standing here—here by the bed," gasped the terrified girl. "I saw you help to drag her out of the room."
"Nonsense, my dear; you've been dreaming. That's nightmare. Go to sleep and don't talk such foolishness."
The girl lay awake all night. In the morning she went to the housekeeper and said that she must go. She couldn't stop another night in the place after what she had seen.
The housekeeper heard her story and told her she was fancying things—there was nobody of that sort in the house. But, of course, if the girl wanted to go she could.
The girl left, and went to the agency to explain matters, and to ask them to get her another situation.
The manageress of the agency listened to her story and said nothing. But she remembered that two years previously a servant on their books had left through seeing something of the same sort. On that occasion the girl had described it as a ghost.
The truth of the matter was this. The apparition was that of a mad woman—the daughter of the house, a woman of five-and-thirty. Her father and mother had engaged a female keeper, and kept the poor demented creature at home. Ordinarily she was quiet enough. But at times she became cunning or violent, and, escaping from the apartment at the top of the house in which she was kept, made her way into a room occupied by others.
The family entertained and had frequent visitors, but only the most intimate of their relatives knew that in the upper part of the house there was a mad woman under restraint.
There is a fine house standing in its own grounds in the northern part of London. It is occupied by a wealthy family, and none of the large staff of servants are presumably aware of the secret that the family jealously guard.
All they know is that the upper part of one wing of the house, which they never enter, is occupied by their mistress's father, an old gentleman, who is bedridden, and is rather eccentric and dislikes strange faces. For this reason he has his own valet and an aged man-servant to attend to him, and these are the only people, with the exception of the master and mistress, who ever go into that part of the house.
But the mistress's bedridden father is a fiction. The rooms in reality are occupied by the son of the house—a son whom, owing to his terrible disfigurement, it would have been more merciful to have strangled at his birth, but who has been loved and reared and tended to live apart from his fellow-men.
The unhappy young man's sisters have never seen him. It would not be right that they should be allowed to look upon a terrible affliction which, in common parlance, is called "a freak of nature." Only the father and mother, the two attendants, and the family doctor know how terrible the affliction is, or how shocking is the tragedy the unhappy parents are guarding in the "secret chambers" of their home.
All the "freaks," all the strange deformities, are not the offspring of poor parents, who permit them to be seen or exhibited. The joined twins, the side-show phenomena of nature, are born in all ranks of society.
Only now and again does the world know of the tragedy—for tragedy it is—in the family circle of the well-to-do.
The "misfortune" is concealed. Every precaution is taken against publicity.
Sometimes the "afflicted" member of the family is sent away to be guarded and cared for in a medically-superintended home specially arranged for the reception of such "patients."
There is a London doctor who has a home of this sort. If you were conducted over it, and saw its inmates, you would think that he must have nerves of iron to pass his life in such weird companionship. Young, middle-aged, and old, the patients are every one of them so marred by nature that ordinary life among their fellow-creatures is impossible.
Once in my life, trespassing in a private wood in search of primroses, I came suddenly upon a group of human beings so strange in their appearance, so awful, that for a moment I believed that I was the victim of an hallucination.
It was only when a gentleman came hurriedly up to me, demanding to know what I wanted, and I had explained that I had only trespassed in search of wild flowers, that I learnt the wood formed part of the grounds of a private asylum in which the "afflicted" members of wealthy families were received. I understood then what the terrible scene I had witnessed meant, and I hastened to apologize for my unintentional intrusion.
But a mother's love is not for beauty of form or soundness of mind, and so it frequently happens that the suffering one is dearer to her than all, and is never allowed to be taken from her fostering care.
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.
Every Sunday as I walk to the West there passes me a school of crippled children. In the ranks of the cripples there walk always four dwarfs—four little old women well past middle-age. They are shorter than the shortest little girls in the school. They are so small that children of seven and eight tower above them.
These old ladies hold hands and walk like the little ones. But one of them is over sixty, and they have passed the greater part of their lives in the institution which exists for little crippled girls.
These old ladies have left their homes to be tended here among the children. With the littles ones they do not attract much attention. It is only when you look at them closely you see that they are not children themselves.
The dwarfs who are bom in well-to-do families are not put away; they remain part of the family circle. But because of their presence in it, there is frequently restraint in the matter of acquaintanceship. The dwarf, always intelligent, frequently gentle and affectionate, is loved as dearly as any of the healthy children who thrive and grow. But that it may be spared pain and the pitying glance the home is not as other homes. The "secret," if not guarded, is not obtruded. There is one member of the family who is not seen by the ordinary visitor, who does not take his or her meals at the table when visitors are under the roof.
Even in humbler homes there are sometimes mysteries. There are those who are loved and cared for who never leave the house in the daytime, but see what little of the world may be permitted them after nightfall.
You may sometimes see a woman so closely veiled that her features are indistinguishable being led along the Embankment by the river in the dusk of a summer's evening. The story of that veiled woman is a heartrending one. She was a beautiful girl and about to be married to the man she loved when a woman mad with jealousy flung vitriol in her face. Her life was saved, but it would have been almost better had she died. From that hour only her mother has looked upon her face. From the rest of the world it is mercifully veiled.
Sometimes the secret chamber hides not a misfortune, but a crime. There is an insanity of criminality which delights in the torture of the weak, the suffering, the mentally deficient. Now and again the world is startled by the narrative of secret cruelty practised on helpless children, of an afflicted wife kept as a prisoner neglected and ill-treated. There have been cases in which the presence in a house of one of these victims of monstrous cruelty has remained unsuspected for years. The secret of the "prisoner" has only been revealed by an accident.
Not long ago the mystery of a secret chamber in a humble house in a poor street in Hoxton was discovered.
The school-board officer goes to every house and enters every home in order to see that the children are attending school.
In this home there was no child ever to be discovered. But the officer had information that a little girl of eight was undoubtedly a member of the family.
One night, "in consequence of information received," as the police say, he kept watch, and at nine o'clock he saw the mother come out of the house cautiously, look around, and then return to emerge with a little girl. The officer, who had taken precautions against recognition, followed, and then the mystery was solved.
The little girl was earning the living of her parents by performing at a variety theatre. To prevent the interference of the school authorities the parents kept her shut up all day in the bedroom, and only brought her oat of It to take her to the music-hall.
There are secret chambers in London houses still, the mystery of which has yet to be revealed; some which may remain undiscovered, to be "mysteries" in the daily press fifty or a hundred years hence. The bricked-up cellar that thrills us in the pages of Edgar Allan Poe is playing its part in the criminal tragedies of the twentieth-century Babylon.
Noblemen who live in mean streets—A peer on a pound a week—A princess out in service—Lodgekeeper where once mistress—A grave-digger with royal blood—From £100,000 to nothing
Poverty has so many romances, and they are so varied.
Under the humblest roofs in this great city of ours men and women are daily writing in the book of life beautiful stories of tender love, of noble self-sacrifice, of deeds of heroic endurance. There are idylls of the slums and alleys as charming as ever poet penned; there are stories to be told of the dwellers in mean streets that lift our thoughts far above the sordid things of earth.
But these are romances pure and simple, and in them is no element of mystery. The romances I have in my mind as I write are those in which the poverty conceals from the eyes of the world a truth it would be greatly interested to learn.
When the London season is at its height the daily papers are filled with the gay or great doings of the aristocracy. Every movement is chronicled as being of surpassing interest to the general public. If my lord and my lady entertain their friends at home the details are considered as important as those of a battle in the Far East or a debate in the House of Commons. Even if my lord or my lady dine or sup at a restaurant the fact is duly chronicled. The untitled leaders of the smart set, our wealthy American visitors, the stars of the opera and the stage, share in the general publicity. Celebrities, whether of rank or wealth or talent, are standing items of "Fashionable Intelligence." All the world is made familiar with their features, and their diaries are compiled for them by the staff, male and female, of the popular periodicals.
There are men and women of noble birth and ancient lineage, there are men and women who have been famous in their day in the world of fashion and of art, over whose lives a great silence has settled, who move about in our midst, their very identity unsuspected, who know sorrow and suffering, and sometimes even privation. These are the romances of poverty which are mysteries, because they are rarely fathomed. Now and again the veil is lifted in the hospital, in the parish infirmary, or at the coroner's inquest. But many of them remain hidden for ever by the shallow earth which covers a pauper's coffin.
There is an old, grey-headed gentleman in thread-bare, shiny clothes, who comes out of his poor lodgings in a mean street daily when it is fine and sits in the park. He brings with him a rusty brown bag that once was black. From that bag he takes soon after midday a little packet containing a slice or two of bread and a small piece of cheese. When he has finished his humble meal he walks to the public drinking-fountain and takes a cup of water.
If the society reporter wished to chronicle this midday meal in the "Fashionable Intelligence," this is how he would have to word his paragraph in order to be correct: "Among the company who lunched in Regent's Park to-day was Lord —————. His lordship is at present occupying one room in Great James Street, Lisson Grove, where he is staying incognito under the name of Mr. Wilson."
The old gentleman, who is so poor that he can only afford bread and cheese for lunch—it is his dinner—and one room in Lisson Grove, bears a name as noble as any in the pages of Burke. His ancestral home is one of the show-places of England. But it passed from his family nearly a hundred years ago, when the reverse of fortune came that left a noble house beggared.
Lord ————— is quite alone now. Her ladyship died a year or two ago. She added to the poor little income by shirt-making at home for a West End firm.
When her ladyship died his lordship had an income of 10s. a week. This was generously increased to £1 by a relative who was just a little better off. On £1 a week one of England's "old nobility" is passing a peaceful old age. He has always a smile for the little children who play near him in the park. Sometimes when they see him bring out his bread they think he is going to feed the ducks. But he cannot afford to do that.
Ducks want such big pieces. But now and then he spares a few crumbs for the sparrows.
The parish doctor stood by the bedside of a woman who had been brought to the infirmary some days previously from a common lodging-house in the neighbourhood.
The woman was dying, but quite conscious. The workhouse-master was with the doctor.
"It's an extraordinary story she tells," said the master. "She says she is the Marchioness of —————."
The doctor looked pityingly at the poor creature, who was in the last stage of a fatal disease, and bent down to listen to something she was saying.
"It's quite true," she said. "We separated, you know, a good many years ago, and I never saw him afterwards. What was the good? But I should like him to know I'm dying—if you can find him."
The doctor, hearing the name of the nobleman, remembered something of the story. He went away and made inquiries, which resulted in his being able to find the dying woman's husband.
The Marquis, an elderly man, came to the bedside of his dying wife and forgave her. He waited till the end. When the Marchioness was dead he shook hands with the doctor, thanked him for his kindness, and said he would try and get enough money to have her ladyship decently buried. He kept his word.
Five years afterwards the doctor was rung up at one o'clock in the morning. He put his head out of the window and found that the Marquis had called upon him.
"Doctor," said the Marquis, "I'm married again, and I want you to come to my wife at once."
In the early hours of the morning an heir to the ancient title was bom in lodgings in a little suburban side street.
Up to the present the doctor has not received his fee. He did not press for it. He knew how terribly straitened were the circumstances of the nobleman, whose first wife died in the work-house, and whose second wife presented him with an heir in cheap London lodgings.
In a recent book on Russian life it is told how a young woman who had applied for the position of lady's-maid hesitated to produce her papers of identification when asked by the lady who wished to engage her. "Ah! Madame," the girl sobbed, "when you see who I am you will not take me as your servant, and I have been so long looking for a home and work by which I may live."
The lady, expecting some dreadful revelation, was astonished, when the "papers" were reluctantly handed to her, to find that the applicant for a situation as a domestic servant was of noble birth—a princess, in fact.
Princesses do not go into service in England. But ladies of title, concealing their identity, sometimes try to find a home and employment by becoming servants.
There came to me some years ago a middle-aged lady of refined and gentle appearance. She had heard that I wanted a cook, and she pleaded to be allowed to take the situation.
I told her frankly that I did not think she was a cook in the domestic sense of the word, and I asked her where she had been employed. Eventually the poor lady confided in me.
The story she told was a simple one and a very old one. The solicitor who, after her husband's death, had the management of her affairs had absconded, and she and her daughter found themselves penniless. The daughter, having a good voice and appearance, obtained an engagement in the chorus of a travelling opera company. The mother, dropping her title and changing her name, went to a registry office and entered herself on the books as a cook. In her youth she had had a taste for cooking, and had been one of the first to take lessons when it became the fashion for ladies to master the details of the culinary art.
Lady ———— had some trouble about references, but, confiding in an old friend who knew of her qualifications, she got over the difficulty. In her first situation she was uncomfortable, and after three months she left. But, fortified with a reference, she obtained a situation in a good family. There it more than once happened that Lady ———— cooked for people who had been guests at her own table in her husband's lifetime. They would have been considerably astonished had they known that their former hostess was acting in the capacity of paid cook in the kitchen of the house in which they were dining. A break-down in health compelled Lady ———— to give up her situation. It was after her recovery—the little she had been able to save by hard work swallowed up in the expenses of her illness—that she came to me, hoping I might put her in the way of getting some articles she had written on "Cooking for Ladies" accepted by a newspaper. When I last heard of Lady ———— she was going out to cook on what I believe is called "the job."
Here is a little tobacconist's shop in the suburbs. The customers who enter it daily for their cigars and tobacco, sometimes for a box of lights, and see a neatly dressed lady, who is the proprietress, behind the counter, have not the slightest idea that the lady who supplies them with their packets of cigarettes and ounces of tobacco has a "handle to her name," that her husband is the heir to an earldom, and that in due course the fair tobacconist who is keeping a little shop for a livelihood will have a right to, sit among the peeresses of England as the Countess of —————.
In the environs of London there is a comely old lady who lives in the lodge on a great estate. Sometimes she comes out and opens the park gate that the occupants of a magnificent carriage may drive up to the Hall, which is their residence. The residents at the Hall are wealthy Americans. The old lady is the widow of the former owner. It was the home of his ancestors for three centuries. To the Hall he brought her as a bride to be its mistress. Now she is the lodge-keeper. Her husband before he died was employed as a coachman to a-wealthy City merchant. It was this merchant who recommended the widow to the Americans as a trustworthy woman to have the lodge.
Even the descendants of kings come upon evil times and bring the Crown of England into the romance of poverty. The sexton of a West End church was one of the co-heirs to the barony in a famous peerage claim concerning which evidence was given before the House of Lords. This gentleman, who followed the humble occupation of a grave-digger, was entitled to quarter the Royal Arms. His direct descent from Thomas Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, fifth son of Edward III, was undisputed. A barefooted, ragged little lad playing in a back court in Wapping is the descendant of the O'Neills, the scion of a race of kings renowned in Irish history.
In one of the worst streets of London, a street that is painted in the blackest colours in Mr. Charles Booth's great and exhaustive work, there is a house let out in rooms. The inhabitants of this street are mostly criminals. They are frankly classified as thieves, burglars, and bullies. But in this house, if we enter it, we shall find a man of education and refinement occupying with his wife and child two humble, scantily furnished rooms. If you know the neighbourhood, the "appearance" of this family at once rivets your attention. Their features, their neatness and cleanliness, their speech—all are in direct contrast to anything you have met with in the locality.
In what circumstances they have drifted to such a neighbourhood as this I do not know; but their poverty they confess themselves. The man is in bad health. He is waiting till he gets a little stronger to find something to do. In the meantime he is living in a neighbourhood in which it is not safe for a decent person to be abroad after nightfall. He has been knocked down twice himself. His respectable appearance led the inhabitants of the street to imagine that he must have some money about him.
This man bears an honoured name. Living where he does, there is no need for him to conceal it. To the thieves and hooligans who are his neighbours the name means nothing. Respectable people never come down the street. Knowing his name, his ancestry, and the position his kith and kin have held in public life, the man is to me a mystery. His poverty I can understand—I have seen the brother of a world-famous divine in a wretched room in a slum in the Borough, and I have seen his children given boots that they should not have to go barefooted to school in the winter-time—but this man has hidden himself away in a criminal area, in a street that is notorious, and here with his wife and child he must rub shoulders night and day with the vilest of the vile.
To live by choice in a street where you are liable to be brutally assaulted directly you put your nose outside your door is an act the motive of which is difficult to fathom.
A little way out of London, on the road to a popular Thames-side resort, there is a tavern with a tea-garden attached to it. All day long on Sunday traps pull up there, and the occupants get out and refresh while the ostlers water the horses.
Sometimes the ladies of the party remain in the trap and take their refreshment there. To them there comes with shuffling feet an old, grey-headed waiter, who is specially engaged to do the "outside Sunday work." He takes the order and returns with the required "refreshment" on a tray. When he is paid, and receives a penny or twopence for himself, the old fellow returns thanks and doffs his weather-beaten cap to the ladies in quite the old-world courtly style.
There was a time in the days long ago when he raised a glossy high hat in the same courtly way—not to the ladies in a one-horse wagonette or a pony-trap, but to the ladies in smart victorias and aristocratic barouches. And he drove his own horses, too—a splendid pair that made many a lounger in the park look after his mail phaeton and admire his "cattle."
He could have signed his name to a cheque for £100,000 in those days, and the cheque would have been paid by his bankers.
He had not made his money. It had been made for him by his father, a man of renown in the City, the head of a firm that had been honourably known in commerce for many generations.
His father, with an ample fortune, retired from the business and left that fortune to his son, who had nothing to do but live as a private gentleman.
He lived that life till he was forty. Then a large portion of his capital was lost by an unwise investment, and from that day things began to go badly, and in a few years he found himself penniless. His wife, who had been accustomed to every comfort and luxury, died before the final disaster came, and left him with a daughter who was a cripple and an invalid.
Father and daughter faced adversity bravely. Together they managed to, pay the rent of a small cottage at Chiswick. The daughter was clever with her needle and did fancy work at home; the father obtained a situation as waiter, and was sent out with provision vans to children's treats and picnics. But he got too old for that, and at last was glad of the Sunday job on which we have seen him engaged.
The man who could once sign his cheque for £100,000 is grateful for the pennies that he gets from the "pull-up" parties. When the Sunday is fine he goes back to his invalid daughter with a smiling face. When the Sunday is wet he goes home with a smile all the same—but his heart is as heavy as his pocket is light.
There died recently under tragic circumstances a man whom I had seen rise to heights he had never dreamed of in his youth. Handsome, agreeable, and refined, everybody liked him and said he would do well. But from a humble beginning he rose to honours and dignities. He held an official position that gave him a magnificent equipage to ride in, and the honour conferred upon him made his wife "her ladyship."
He gave grand entertainments and receptions, and his name was constantly before the world in the public prints. His daughter attended a fashionable school and was fetched every day by a footman.
I saw him in his splendour, and complimented him on the favours that Fortune had showered upon him with such a lavish hand.
Years went by, and gradually his name disappeared from the public journals. He dropped out. The world moved on, and nobody troubled very much what had become of him.
Then one day I saw him again. He passed me in the street.
The man I had seen honoured, féted, and acclaimed had come to the point at which he shunned his friends. I would have stopped and spoken, but he hurried past me.
Three weeks later I heard of his death. He had died penniless. He had known the torture of penury for years.
And "her ladyship," broken-hearted, tortured by the memory of the past magnificence, had eaten her heart out in sorrow by the side of the man she loved.
I had seen their gorgeous carriage pass with its mounted escort through acclaiming crowds. Husband and wife died tragically. The daughter who used to be fetched from school by the family footman died not long ago of starvation in circumstances of the most intense pathos.
About this romance of poverty there was, alas! the grim note of a poignant realism. But it was a mystery that only the tragedy of its victims' deaths revealed.