We can hardly say which was the most surprising to us, the loyalty of Mrs. Grimes or the patience of John. During that night, as we were told two days afterwards by his wife, he stormed with passion. The papers she had locked up in order that he should not get at them and destroy them. He swore that everything should be cleared out on the following morning. But when the morning came he did not even say a word to Mackenzie, as the wretched, downcast, brokenhearted creature passed upstairs to his work. “You see I knows him, and how to deal with him,” said Mrs. Grimes, speaking of her husband. “There aint another like himself nowheres;—he’s that good. A softer-hearteder man there aint in the public line. He can speak dreadful when his dander is up, and can look—; oh, laws, he just can look at you! But he could no more put his hands upon a woman, in the way of hurting—no more than be an archbishop.” Where could be the man, thought we to ourselves as this was said to us, who could have put a hand—in the way of hurting—upon Mrs. Grimes?
On that occasion, to the best of our belief, the policeman contented himself with depositing Mrs. Mackenzie at her own lodgings. On the next day she was picked up drunk in the street, and carried away to the lockup house. At the very moment in which the story was being told to us by Mrs. Grimes, Mackenzie had gone to the police office to pay the fine, and to bring his wife home. We asked with dismay and surprise why he should interfere to rescue her—why he did not leave her in custody as long as the police would keep her? “Who’d there be to look after the children?” asked Mrs. Grimes, as though she were offended at our suggestion. Then she went on to explain that in such a household as that of poor Mackenzie the wife is absolutely a necessity, even though she be an habitual drunkard. Intolerable as she was, her services were necessary to him. “A husband as drinks is bad,” said Mrs. Grimes—with something, we thought, of an apologetic tone for the vice upon which her own prosperity was partly built—“but when a woman takes to it, it’s the ⸻ devil.” We thought that she was right, as we pictured to ourselves that man of letters satisfying the magistrate’s demand for his wife’s misconduct, and taking the degraded, half-naked creature once more home to his children.
We saw him about twelve o’clock on that day, and he had then, too evidently, been endeavouring to support his misery by the free use of alcohol. We did not speak of it down in the parlour; but even Mrs. Grimes, we think, would have admitted that he had taken more than was good for him. He was sitting up in the bedroom with his head hanging upon his hand, with a swarm of our learned friend’s papers spread on the table before him. Mrs. Grimes, when he entered the house, had gone upstairs to give them out to him; but he had made no attempt to settle himself to his work. “This kind of thing must come to an end,” he said to us with a thick, husky voice. We muttered something to him as to the need there was that he should exert a manly courage in his troubles. “Manly!” he said. “Well, yes; manly. A man should be a man, of course. There are some things which a man can’t bear. I’ve borne more than enough, and I’ll have an end of it.”
We shall never forget that scene. After awhile he got up, and became almost violent. Talk of bearing! Who had borne half as much as he? There were things a man should not bear. As for manliness, he believed that the truly manly thing would be to put an end to the lives of his wife, his children, and himself at one swoop. Of course the judgment of a mealymouthed world would be against him, but what would that matter to him when he and they had vanished out of this miserable place into the infinite realms of nothingness? Was he fit to live, or were they? Was there any chance for his children but that of becoming thieves and prostitutes? And for that poor wretch of a woman, from out of whose bosom even her human instincts had been washed by gin—would not death to her be, indeed, a charity? There was but one drawback to all this. When he should have destroyed them, how would it be with him if he should afterwards fail to make sure work with his own life? In such case it was not hanging that he would fear, but the self-reproach that would come upon him in that he had succeeded in sending others out of their misery, but had flinched when his own turn had come. Though he was drunk when he said these horrid things, or so nearly drunk that he could not perfect the articulation of his words, still there was a marvellous eloquence with him. When we attempted to answer, and told him of that canon which had been set against self-slaughter, he laughed us to scorn. There was something terrible to us in the audacity of the arguments which he used, when he asserted for himself the right to shuffle off from his shoulders a burden which they had not been made broad enough to bear. There was an intensity and a thorough hopelessness of suffering in his case, an openness of acknowledged degradation, which robbed us for the time of all that power which the respectable ones of the earth have over the disreputable. When we came upon him with our wise saws, our wisdom was shattered instantly, and flung back upon us in fragments. What promise could we dare to hold out to him that further
