Chapter II: I Introduce My Wife—She Disappears! (2)

“I think it’s time we were going,” I remarked, pulling out my watch; “the crowd is thinning, and I suppose it is bound in the same direction.” We were late, as I expected; every spot was filled in the little theatre when we arrived, and the performance had begun. As the box‐keeper opened the door to admit us to our standing‐post on the first tier, we were almost thrown back by the roar of applause that burst upon our ears; it rose and fell like a mighty gust of wind, and seemed literally to make the ground shake under our feet and the walls tremble round us. For a moment I was stunned. There was a lull, and then we went in. The singer had left the stage, but the air was still vibrating with the melody of her voice and of the rapturous echoes it had awakened. A fine barytone was confiding his despair and his hopes to the audience, but it fell idly on their ears after what had gone before. The _Sonnambula_ appeared again; the first notes were greeted by another salvo of bravos, louder, more impassioned and prolonged, than the first; again and again the plaudits rose, handkerchiefs fluttered, and hands clapped—the house was electrified. She could bear it no longer; overcome by emotion, she held out her arms to the spectators in an entreating gesture that seemed to say: “Enough! Spare me; I can bear no more!” It was either an impulse of childlike nature or the most finished piece of art ever seen on the stage. Whatever it was, the effect was tremendous. I suppose it could not really have been so, but I would have sworn that the house rocked. It was a sustained roll of human thunder from the pit to the gallery, and from the gallery to the pit. Isabel—for it was she—made another passionate response with the same childlike, bewitching grace, and rushed off the scene. I was rooted to the spot, not daring to look at my uncle; not thinking of him, of anything. I was like a man in a nightmare, held fast in the grasp of a spectre, longing to call for help, but powerless to utter a sound.

The manager came forward and addressed a few words of expostulation to the audience; implored them to control their ecstasies a little for the sake of the sensitive and gifted being who had called them forth. He was nervous and at the same time triumphant. He was answered by a loud buzz of assent. The _Sonnambula_ once more came forth, and this time a deep, suppressed murmur was the only interruption. The dress, the glare, the gaslight, the strange way the lustrous coils of her black hair were arranged—tumbled in a sort of studied tangle all over the forehead—while a veil, half on, half off, concealed part of the face, the entire transformation of the _mise‐en‐scène_, in fact, might easily have disguised her identity from eyes less preternaturally keen than mine; but my glance had scarcely fallen on the frail, shrouded figure, as it glided in from the background, than I knew that I beheld my wife; beheld her clasped—gracious heavens! yes, I saw it, and stood there motionless and dumb—clasped by the man who was howling out some idiotic lamentations. She stepped forward, and began to sing. Her head was first slightly bowed over her breast, and her hands clasped and hanging. The first bars were warbled out in a kind of bird‐like whisper, as if she were in a dream; but little by little they grew higher, more sonorous, until, carried away by the power of the music and her own magnificent interpretation of it, she flung back her head, and let the gossamer cloud fall from it, revealing the unshrouded contour of the face, upturned, inspired, all alight with the triumph of the hour, while the bell‐like notes rang out with a breadth and pathos that melted and stirred every heart in that vast crowd like touches of fire. It was a vision of beauty that defies all words. I neither spoke nor moved while the song lasted; but when the last chord died out, and the pent‐up hearts of the listeners broke forth in new peals that seemed to sweep over the songstress in a flood of joy and triumph, I awoke and came to my senses.

“Come away!” I gasped, and turned to move out. But the words stuck in my throat. My uncle had caught the delirium, and was cheering and bravoing like a maniac. “Glorious! Grand, by Jove! Encore! Splendid!” He was shouting like a madman, whirling his hat and stamping. His brown face was young again. I never beheld such a transformation in any human countenance.

“Are you mad, sir?” I shrieked into his ear, while I clutched his arm.

I suppose he was mad; I know he kept on the same frantic shouts and clappings for several minutes, not paying any more heed to me than to the floor he was so vigorously stamping. I was frightened at last. I thought anguish and shame for me had driven him out of his mind; so, taking him gently by the arm, I said I wanted to speak to him. He let me push him on before me, and we got out. He was still much excited, and neither of us spoke till we were in the open air.

“My dear boy,” he said suddenly, with a shamefaced look, “I couldn’t help it for the life of me! By Jove, but it was the grandest thing I ever heard in my life. The house reeled round you. I would stake my head there wasn’t a sane man in it but yourself!”

I laughed bitterly. The irony of the words was dreadful. “Sane?” I cried. “You think I was sane? I thank heaven I behaved like a sane man; but if I had been within reach of that ruffian’s throat, I’d have dashed his brains out as ruthlessly as any escaped maniac from Bedlam. I would do it now, if I had him!”

My uncle stopped and looked at me. He was thoroughly sobered, and I could see that he was terrified. He told me long afterwards that he never could have believed passion could transfigure a face as it did mine; he said I had _murder_ written in my eyes as plainly as ever it was written on a printed page. And I believe him. I felt I could have committed murder at that moment. I would have killed that man, if I had held him, if the gallows had been there to hang me the next hour. I have never felt the same towards murderers since that moment. It was an awful revelation to me of the hidden springs of crime that may lie deep down in a man’s heart, and never be suspected even by himself, until the touch that can wake them into deadly life has come. I can never think of that evening without an humbling sense of my own innate wickedness, of the benign mercy that overruled that frightful impulse. Given the immediate opportunity and the absence of the supreme, supervening goodness that stood between me and myself, and I should have been a murderer. The gulf that separates each one of us from crime is narrower than we imagine. The discovery of this truth is humbling, but perhaps none the less salutary for that.

“Come along, Clide; come along with me,” my uncle said in the soothing tone one uses to a fractious child. “It’s all my fault. I ought to have known better than to let you go there at all; I ought to have gone by myself. I’m no better than a blubbering old idiot to you, my boy.”

I went with him passively; we walked to our lodgings without speaking. I shall never forget the kindness of my uncle all through that night. He was as patient and as gentle with me as a woman, bearing with me as tenderly as a mother could have done. I could not rest, and I would not let him rest. I called for _café noir_, and I kept drinking cup after cup of it until, added to the stronger stimulant that was setting my blood on fire, I almost worked myself into a brain fever, bursting out into paroxysms of childish rebellion, and then lapsing into fits of dumb despair. I had first insisted on rushing off to the hotel and lying in wait for Isabel, and compelling her there and then either to return to me or to part from me for ever; but my uncle was inexorable in opposing this, and I knew by his tone that he was not to be trifled with. There was a something about him in certain moods that made resistance to his will as impossible as wrestling with an elephant. I gave in, and allowed him to give his reasons for preventing my taking a step which, result how it might, was sure to be a most humiliating one for me; not only or chiefly as a husband, but as a De Winton. My uncle’s anxiety lest the old name should suffer by the event threw his sympathy for my individual sorrow comparatively into the shade. While my wife’s flight was known only to my immediate household, my step‐ mother—whose pride and touchiness about the honor of a De Winton was almost as morbid as his own—and the three tried friends of my dear father’s youth, it was just possible that it might remain a secret beyond that small circle, and he clung to this hope as tenaciously as I did to the hope of recovering my wife. The De Wintons were a proud race, and justly so. We had nobler things to be proud of than the primary one of ancient, and I may venture to say illustrious, lineage: we could boast with truth that there was no bar sinister on the old escutcheon; our men had never known cowardice, nor our women shame; no maiden of our house had dishonored a father’s white hairs, or wife brought a blot upon her husband’s name. I was the last of our line so far, and the thought that it should die out under a cloud of shame with me was bitter with the bitterness of death to the admiral; for he was at heart as proud as a Plantagenet, with all his free and easy talk, and his jovial, jolly‐tar manner to everybody, especially to his inferiors. _Noblesse oblige_ was engraven on the inmost core of his honest heart; and he could not conceive a De Winton feeling less acutely on the point than he did himself. He had never been married; this partially accounted, perhaps, for his inability to merge the De Winton in the husband. It is possible that, if I had never been married, I should have comprehended his stern abstract view of the case, and have felt with him that the husband’s misery was as nothing compared to the blow dealt at the pride of a De Winton. As it was, I could not feel this. I could have seen the whole clan of the De Wintons and their escutcheon in the bottom of the Red Sea, if I could have rescued myself from the anguish of renouncing for ever the young wife who had so cruelly charmed and blighted my life. I was driven to make this unworthy avowal on my uncle’s suggesting that, assuming it were still possible for me to forgive her, she might lay it down as a condition of our reunion that she was to pursue her career on the stage. He merely threw out the idea as a wild notion that crossed his thoughts for a moment; but when I hinted at the possibility of yielding to this painful and humiliating condition rather than renounce Isabel for ever, he flew into such a frenzy of indignation that to calm him I believe I was cowardly enough to swallow my words, and declare that they had not been spoken in earnest. It was some time, however, before he subsided from the agitation they caused him. The idea of alluding, even in jest, to the possibility of a play‐actress flaunting our name upon the boards of the theatre was too dreadful to be contemplated without unmitigated horror. If I let her go her mad career alone, the chances were that this disgrace would be spared us. Isabel had proved clearly enough so far that she desired secrecy to the full as much as we did; but if she continued on the stage as my wife, secrecy became impossible. She might play under the assumed name she now bore, but the true one would soon be blazoned abroad, do what we all might to conceal it. The managers who speculated on her voice would be quick to discover it, and make capital out of it. The admiral was so strong in his denunciation of the madness of the whole thing that he convinced me he was right. This little incident left him more than ever determined to keep me as much as possible in the background, and I so far acknowledged the wisdom of his views as to consent to let him go by himself to try and see Isabel in the morning.

It proved a fruitless mission. The _concierge_ said that the _signorina_ had not left her room yet; but the servant, in answer to my uncle’s ring at her door, informed him that she had gone out for an early drive—it was not eight o’clock—and that she would not be in until dinner‐hour. Would monsieur take the trouble to call later? Monsieur said he would, and he did; but he was then informed that the _signorina_ had taken a chill in her drive, and had gone to bed. My uncle came home in great wrath; he believed no more in the chill than he had believed in the drive, and he was for writing there and then to Isabel, telling her so, and demanding an interview without more ado, using firm language and hinting at sterner measures if she refused. I entreated him not to do this. I don’t know whether in the bottom of my heart I believed the servant’s story, but I persuaded myself and then him that I did; that it was only natural that a tender, delicate‐fibred creature like her should have been done up after the excitement of last evening; and that we had better leave her in peace for a day. He pooh‐poohed this contemptuously: the excitement was just what she liked in the business; it was what play‐actors, men and women, all alike lived on. He humored me, however, and consented to put off the letter till the next day. Meantime, something might turn up. I might meet her uncle myself, and button‐hole the scoundrel on the spot. He must walk out some time or other, and I was determined to be on the watch. I paced up and down before the hotel for three weary hours, glancing up continually at the windows. I knew from my uncle what floor Isabel occupied. Once I fancied I caught sight of the fellow’s face looking out for a moment, and then hurriedly withdrawn. Was it only fancy, or had he really seen me, and drawn back to escape my seeing him? I lounged into the coffee‐room, and adroitly elicited from one of the waiters that the _signorina_ was keeping very quiet, so as to avoid any disappointment for the forthcoming representation; she was to sing again in two nights, and no one was to be admitted to see her in the interval. Orders to this effect had been given to the _concierge_, who was to deny all visitors on the plea of the _signorina’s_ state of nervous debility, which made the slightest excitement off the stage fatal to her. When I repeated this to the admiral, he set his brown face in a scowl, and we very nearly quarrelled outright before he again yielded to my resistance, and agreed to wait two days more, and see whether she kept her engagement for the next performance. On the morning of the second day we both went out together to the baths. As we were passing through the Etablissement gardens, a young man came up to a group of people walking ahead of us, and gave some news that provoked sudden surprise, apparently of no pleasant nature; for we heard the words, “Abominable sell!” “What an extraordinary affair!” repeated with angry emphasis. We had not heard a word of what the young man had said, but the broken comments that reached us seemed, as if by some magnetic influence, to inform us of their meaning. The admiral, in his off‐hand, sailor way, walked up to the party, and asked if any accident had happened on the coast. “Oh! no; no accident,” the bearer of the news said, “but a most disagreeable thing for everybody. Graziella has bolted, no one knows when or how; her rooms were found vacant an hour ago, and there was not a trace of her or the fellow who was with her. The Hôtel Royal was in a tremendous commotion about it; the landlord had been down to the station and to the quay, but there was no trace of them at either place. The landlord believed they had eloped during the night, by some highway or by‐way, so as to avoid detection; but why or wherefore was the mystery. They had paid their bill. It was a horrible sell, for the little creature was the trump‐card of the season—a second Malibran.”

I knew as well as if I had followed my uncle, and heard the intelligence with my own ears, what he had to tell me when he turned back, and came up to me, intending to break it gently. It seemed utterly useless after this to go to the hotel with the hope of gaining further particulars, but I urged at the same time that it was possible the landlord himself might be a party to the affair, and that, if he had been bought over to hold his tongue, he might be bought to loosen it. I could not count on the necessary command over myself to speak or to listen to others speaking of the event at this stage, so I yielded to my uncle’s wish, and went home; he accompanied me to the door, for he judged by my looks that I was not fit to be left to go back alone. He then started off to the Rue Aguado. He found the place in an uproar about the flight, but no one could throw a particle of light on the time, the manner, or the motive of it. The _concierge_ remembered seeing a lady, small and slight, and with a very elastic step, walk rapidly out of the house late on the previous evening, dressed in the deepest mourning, with a widow’s crape veil, and holding her handkerchief to her eyes, as if crying bitterly; he had remarked her at the time, and thought she had been visiting some one in the hotel, and that she was in fresh mourning for her husband, poor thing! Everybody agreed that this must have been La Graziella in disguise. But beyond this not the smallest clew was found that could direct the pursuit of the fugitives. Their luggage had been carried off as mysteriously as themselves; no one had seen it removed. This induced the suspicion that they must have had an accomplice on the premises. The landlord, however, had a precedent to fall back on—a swindler who had lived at his expense for three weeks, and then decamped one fine morning, bag and baggage, having carried them all off himself, disguised as a porter, while several travellers were under way in the courtyard with their separate lots of luggage, and porters were hurrying in and out with them.

For two days after this event, which checkmated every movement on our part, we did nothing but wander about Dieppe, watching helplessly for some information that could have directed us what to do. My uncle was constantly down on the quay and at the railway station, questioning the sailors and the officials, and always coming back just as void of information as he went. He was more irascible than ever now about the honor of the De Wintons, and would not allow me to interfere directly or indirectly. I resented this tyranny; but the fact of my interference having already proved so disastrous gave him the whip‐hand over me, and I felt it was wiser in my own interest to subside and let him act. He was actively seconded in his endeavors to track the fugitives by the manager of the theatre, who was resolved—so we heard on all sides—to spare neither trouble nor expense in recapturing his prize. The collapse of such a _prima donna_ was a serious loss to him; he had gone to considerable expense in preparing for her _début_, and it had been so brilliant as to ensure the promise of an overflowing house to the end of the season. On one side my uncle was gratified at the intelligence and energy displayed by the manager; but on the other hand it put him in a ferment of terror. What if, in his search after Graziella, he should discover who she was and what name she bore! The bare thought of this almost drove him frantic. The manager’s opinion, it would seem, was that she had escaped in a fishing‐ smack. This was the most likely mode of flight for any one, indeed, to adopt from a seaport town like Dieppe; no preliminaries were required in the way of tickets or passports, and the fugitives might steer themselves to any coast they pleased, and land unobserved where it suited them. It was useless, however, for us to leave Dieppe until we heard something. While the manager was vigorously prosecuting the search on his side, my uncle was busy on ours. He suggested that it would be well to make an exploring expedition amongst the hamlets on the cliffs‐groups of huts scattered at short intervals over the long range of the _falaises_ overhanging the sea, and inhabited by a scanty and miserable population.

We had felt it necessary to take a few safe agents of the police into our confidence; and before setting to work among the _gens de falaise_, as they are called by the dwellers on the plain, we consulted them as to the best mode of proceeding, and asked some information as to the sort of people we had to deal with. The police advised us to leave the attempt alone. They said the “folk of the cliffs” were so simple that their name was a by‐word for stupidity down below. It required little short of a surgical operation to convey a new idea of the simplest kind into their brain. There was a story current in the town of how, not so very long ago, a gang of robbers prowled about the neighborhood, and made it expedient for the mayor to issue a proclamation, wherein it was notified that nobody would be allowed to enter the gates after night‐fall without a lantern. The notice was placarded all over the walls, and this is how it worked with the _gens de falaise_: Ding‐dong came a ring at the gate one evening, and the sentry called out: “Qui vive?”

“Gens de falaise!” (Pronounced fa_w_laise.)

“Have you a lantern?”

“Eh, oui!”

“Is there a candle in it?”

“Eh, non! We were not told to!”

“Well, now you’re told to; be off and get one!”

Next evening ding‐dong come the travellers again. “Qui vive?”

“Gens de falaise!”

“Have you a lantern?”

“Eh, oui!”

“And a candle in it?”

“Eh, oui?”

“Is it lighted?”

“Eh, non! We were not told to.”

“Well, now you’re told to; go back and light it.”

Away went the _gens de falaise_ again, and finally returned a third time to the charge with a lantern and a candle in it, and lighted.

This was not very encouraging to persons who wanted to question intelligent observers. We tried it, however, but soon found that rumor had not maligned the simple dwellers on the cliffs, and that nothing was to be gleaned from their dull, unobservant eyes.

Four days passed, and still we were in the same dense darkness. The suspense and inaction became unendurable to me.

“Uncle,” I said, “I can stand this no longer. I will run up to Paris, and set the lynx‐eyes of the police there on the lookout for us. Perhaps it will be of no use; but anything is better than waiting here doing nothing.”

My uncle fell in with the idea at once. I set off to Paris, and left him at Dieppe, where, in truth, it seemed more likely that information of some sort must transpire sooner or later.

To Be Continued.

The Colonization Of New South Wales By Great Britain. Concluded.

It is obvious, then, that, if the remarkable prosperity which has befallen the English Colonies in Australia is to be ascribed, in any degree, to the sagacity of the government that sent out the first expedition, or of those who then and subsequently presided over it, we must look for it in the perfection of the reformatory system, with a view to which the original constitution of the colony was exclusively framed. The idea of making the colonization of a newly discovered territory of prodigious resources subservient to the reformation of as many as possible of the criminals of an over‐populated country is a conception of the noblest philanthropy; as the attempt to use a new and promising colony for the mere purpose of getting rid anyhow of the dangerous classes would be an act of guilty folly, the result of an indolent and heartless selfishness, such as even the most heartless and the most selfish of oligarchies should blush to have perpetrated. For the prosecution of the former object more care and pains should have been expended than under ordinary circumstances in sending out to the new settlement a colony fully equipped with all that the mother‐country had to give it. The reformed, as they stepped forth from their cells and shackles, once more masters of their own actions, free agents, reinvested with reason’s noblest prerogative—the liberty of choosing good and rejecting evil—should have found a sound and healthy society with which to mingle. They should have found themselves at once amidst a society based on those principles of religion, law, and justice which characterize even the feeblest form of Christian civilization. Such a society they should have found immediately outside their prison‐walls, into which they might glide, as it were, unperceived, and from which they should gradually and insensibly take their tone. What man in his sober senses could have anticipated any thorough and permanent reformation of criminals in a society consisting exclusively, after making exception of the officials and the military guard, of the very criminals themselves? In reading the inaugural address of the first governor, we naturally conclude that the government which organized the expedition was deeply impressed with the necessity of an opposite course. But the illusion is soon dispelled. We discover to our astonishment that the infant colony took out with it no one condition of a civilized society. Of law there was simply none. Even the formalities of martial law, when, soon after the settlement of the penal colony, it was thought expedient to have recourse to them, were found to be impracticable, because of some technical difficulty which there had not been the sagacity to foresee and provide against. Whatever there was of justice was wholly dependent on the caprice and dispositions of individuals. Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless the fact that, after the retirement of the first governor, the administration of the colony was entrusted for three years to the hands of the officers of the 102d Regiment. Unfit for such a responsibility as were the sea‐ captains from amongst whom the first four governors were selected, officers of the army were yet more so. The previous habits and training of English regimental officers are such as to disqualify them, generally speaking, for judicial functions. But the unfitness of military men in England for this office was much greater at that period than at the present day, as they were more illiterate. The government of a colony transferred to a regimental mess‐room forms indeed a humiliating contrast to the glowing periods of Commander Phillip. Mr. Therry tells us (p. 69):

“The first four governors of New South Wales, Phillip, Hunter,
King, and Bligh, exercised a rule (and this includes the mess‐room
interregnum) which partook much of the character of the government
of a large jail or penitentiary.”

Two years and a half after the disembarkation of the first batch of convicts fresh instructions arrived from the home government respecting the allotment of land. By these instructions, the advantages already enjoyed by the emancipists were extended to the privates and non‐ commissioned officers of the military guard on the spot, but no provision whatsoever was made for free emigrants from the mother‐country. So that, when the sixth governor, Macquarie, “considered that the colony was selected as a depot for convicts; that the land properly belonged to them, as they emerged from their condition of servitude, and that emigrants were intruders on the soil,” we can only conclude that he interpreted the policy of the government at home more correctly than the more enthusiastic sailor who first presided over it. In spite of the singular incapacity displayed in the first organization of the settlement at Sydney, the following illustration of the state of law and society therein twenty years after its establishment, would be incredible if we had it on less trustworthy authority than that of Mr. Therry. He tells us (p. 74) that, during the rule of one Capt. Bligh, 1806‐8, “the judge‐advocate, Atkins, was a person of no professional mark, and was, besides, of a very disreputable character.” The governor reported of him to the Secretary of State that “he had been known to pronounce sentence of death when intoxicated”! With Atkins was associated a convict named Crossley, who had been transported for forging a will, and for perjury, and who had been convicted of swindling in the colony.

The result of such a state of things was as unavoidable as it was fatal. If the reformatory system in the penal colony had been as wise and efficacious as it was lamentably, nay, wickedly, the reverse, such of the convicts as yielded to the nobler motives of civil life and the claims of conscience should have been able to mix unnoticed with the sounder part of the community. Bygones should have been really bygones. The past should have been simply ignored. No allusion to it should have been tolerated. The expiated crime should have been buried out of sight and recollection, so long as there was no relapse. There should have been no such class as an emancipist class. The reformatory institution should have remained as a thing apart, sending from time to time its contingent of convalescents to be incorporated with the healthy body politic.

Instead of this, as the colony increased, the moneyed and influential class, the leading class, in a colony intended to reproduce the glories of England in the fifth great division of the world, consisted of emancipated convicts. No pains taken to perpetuate the memory of these people’s disgrace could have attained so undesirable an object more effectually. They stood out a distinctly marked order in the state. They became landed proprietors, magistrates, high government officials, even legal functionaries. Instead of a decent veil of oblivion being thrown over their antecedents, they were, as in a Methodist experience, even ostentatiously displayed. It almost constituted a boast, and was worn as though it were a decoration of honor. When, subsequently, through the encouragement of one or two of the governors and other causes, the tide of emigration set in from the mother‐country another moneyed and influential class arose of untainted reputation. A bitter rivalry between the two was the immediate consequence. The emancipists excited no sympathy or compassion for the lingering memory of a misfortune which their subsequent lives might be supposed to have retrieved, but which, instead of an obliterated brand, was ostentatiously retained as the badge of a powerful class, which became thus an object of contempt to the more respectable new‐comers. The crimes for which they had been punished, and of which they should, therefore, no longer have borne the burden, reappeared as their accusers in the intercourse of social life. Society snatched up the sword which the law had in mercy laid aside; a remitted punishment was exacted in another form; and the benevolent aim of rescuing the worst class of criminals from irremediable ruin by a reformatory process, if it were ever seriously entertained, was wholly frustrated. For scarcely had the infant settlement, through the gradual influx of immigrants, begun to assume the appearance of a colony, when the original sin of its constitution appeared in the form of an evil, fatal not only to the well‐being, but even to the very existence of a free community. Instead of any effort being made to heal or, at least, to alleviate this evil by some consistent line of policy, it was aggravated by the capricious preference of one or other of the rival classes by successive governors, according to their several idiosyncrasies. An evil of this nature could end only with the extinction of one or other of the antagonistic classes, or the dissolution of the colony; unless indeed the whole reformatory system were remodelled on an entirely different plan. The problem was solved by the adoption of the former alternative. The natural advantages of the country and the commercial energy of the Anglo‐Saxon race proved, at last, too strong for a reformatory system which was not only crude and faulty to the utmost degree, but was literally destructive of its own end and object. After a long struggle against obstacles greater than ever before hindered the development of vast natural resources, the colony prevailed over the prison, and the entail of emancipation was finally cut off by the abolition of transportation in the year 1840.

Turn we now to the penal portion of this quite unique organization for the reformation of criminals. Here, it may be, we shall be able to trace some indications, at least, of that humane sympathy, that sorrow for a fellow‐ creature’s fall and anxiety for his restoration, which appeals to whatever of good may be lingering in the heart of the criminal, not to mention the higher and more tender charities which religion inspires. No gentler instrument of cure would appear to have suggested itself to the minds of the members of the English government of 1788 than the lash!—the lash in the hands of sots and ruffians!

“I was once present in the police office in Sydney when a convict
was sentenced to fifty lashes for not taking off his hat to a
magistrate as he met him on the road.”

Of Capt. P. C. King, who administered the government from 1800 to 1806, Mr. Therry writes:

“He was a man of rough manners, and prone to indulge in offensive
expressions borrowed from the language then in vogue in the
navy.... His temper was irascible and wayward. At one time he
assumed a tone of arrogant and unyielding dictation; at another,
he indulged in jokes unsuited to the dignity of his position.”

Of Capt. Bligh, who succeeded King, Judge Therry tells us that his

“despotic conduct as commander of the _Bounty_ had driven the crew
to mutiny. Yet he who had proved his incapacity for ruling a small
ship’s company was made absolute ruler of a colony so critically
circumstanced as that of New South Wales.... He was the same rude,
despotic man, whether treading the quarter‐deck of the _Bounty_ or
pacing his reception‐room in Government House at Sydney.”
“Throughout the colony,” continues the judge, “the uncontrolled
use of the lash was resorted to, as an incessant and almost sole
instrument of punishment, and too often those who inflicted this
degrading punishment regarded themselves as irresponsible agents,
and kept no record of their darkest deeds.”

But when the backs and the consciences of the unhappy victims of an English reformatory process had become alike hardened to this demoralizing torture, a perverse ingenuity had devised in Norfolk Island a place of penal torment calculated to destroy in its victims the last vestiges of humanity. To human beings thus circumstanced the scaffold became rather an object of desire than of dread. And we learn from Mr. Therry that during the years 1826, 1827, and 1830 no less than one hundred and fifty‐three persons were hung out of a population of fifty thousand.

But we have not yet fathomed the lowest depth of imbecility and of guilty indifference to the commonest dictates of prudence and humanity exhibited in this nefarious scheme for the reformation, forsooth, of criminals.

Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that by the authors of the scheme, although their lips were full of the professions we have quoted, the influence of religion as an agent of reformation was simply ignored. It had not been their original intention to send out any minister at all of their religion with the expedition they had planned. It was owing to the remonstrance of a dignitary of the Established sect that one was, at the last moment, appointed. This appointment, however, does not appear to have been made with any view of bringing the influence of religion to bear on the unfortunate criminals. To them the rudest objects of self‐interest appear to have been the only motives of reformation held out. Dr. Porteous—such was his name—would have displayed more than the ordinary apathy of his class as to any objects of a merely spiritual interest, and a less than ordinary keenness of perception as to its material interests, if he had allowed a large colonial expedition to leave the shores of the mother‐country without any provision whatsoever being made for the celebration of the worship of the Established religion in the distant land to which it was bound. We are told by Mr. Flanagan that a priest of some Spanish ships, which visited the colony in 1793, “observing that a church had not yet been built, lifted up his eyes with astonishment, and declared that, had the place been settled by his nation, a house would have been erected for God before any house had been built for men” (_Hist. of N. S. W._, vol. 1. p. 95). In 1791 a fresh batch of convicts, two thousand and fifty in number, arrived at Sydney, making the sum total of that portion of the population two thousand eight hundred and twenty‐eight. Yet, for these, for the large staff of officials, the military guard, and the few free settlers, the only minister of religion for six years after the foundation of the colony was this churchless chaplain, and the only religious influences accessible to that multitude of unfortunates was the form of Sabbatical prayer adopted by his sect. The one master cause of the inhumanity of the whole scheme was the complete and profound disregard of religious influences engendered in the minds of its authors by that embodiment of religious indifference and lifeless formalism, the established sect in England.

In few, if in any, exiled convicts have the finer sensibilities of our common nature been utterly extinguished. In nearly all, charred and unsightly as may their whole natures have become, diligent and patient labor will come at last to some unquenched fragment of the precious jewel; remote and all but lost, but waiting only for one smallest crevice to be opened through the superincumbent mass of gloom and despair, to spring in light, like a resurrection, to the surface, and fling its delivered lustre to the sun. In nearly all, he who should tenderly but perseveringly dig through the filth and refuse which a highly artificial and evilly constituted state of society has heaped upon its outcasts, would assuredly come at last to some faint trickle of the living fountain, which death only wholly dries up, ready to find its level, and even longing to be released. How many of those sad ship‐loads, when the shores of their native country for ever faded from their view, succumbed to the anguish of some, were it only one, rudely riven tie, and, in the nearest feeling to despair possible out of the place of reprobation, thrilled with a heart’s agony of which the severest bodily pain is but a feeble symbol! Cruel to inhumanity would be the jailer who should refuse to a prisoner in his dungeon the consolation of one ray of the light of day. But who, with the hearts of men, could have forbidden to those most miserable of their fellow‐creatures an entrance to the angels of religion? Who would not have used every effort to secure their ministrations? The Catholic Church, and she alone, could have brought the light of hope within those darkened souls. She alone could have taken from despair that painful past and that ghastly present, have awakened within those hardened consciences the echoes of a nobler being, have folded around the poor outcasts her infinite charities, and enwreathed them in their embrace. She alone could have recalled them through the tears of compunction to the consciousness that they were still men, and might yet be saints; and, like the memory of childhood gliding round the frightful abyss that separated them from innocence, have beckoned, and encouraged, and helped them up the toilsome steep of penance, to the place where conquerors, who have narrowly escaped with their lives, receive their kingdoms and their crowns.

Yet was this mere tribute to the humanity of those forlorn ones wholly withheld from them. The rigors of penal discipline, increasing in severity with the progressive depravity of their unhappy victims, reduced them at length to a condition by comparison of which the lot of the sorriest brute that was ever becudgelled by a ruffian owner was enviable. What a depth of misery, and, worse still, what a bitter consciousness of it, is revealed in the keen reproach of one of them: “When I came here, I had the heart of a man in me, but you have plucked it out, and planted the heart of a brute in its stead!” To talk to such men of reformation could only have been a ghastly jest. Not so much as even a moral motive appears to have been suggested to them. Nothing but the unlovely object of worldly self‐ advantage.

Of such a system there could be but one result. No longer do we experience any surprise at finding that the aborigines, who were to have been civilized, and who, at first, evinced the most friendly disposition towards the new settlers, were shot down and even poisoned by the squatters, soldiers, emigrant adventurers, and emancipists, the standard of whose morality appears to have been about equally high; that men in the highest judicial stations were notoriously immoral; that amongst the most prosperous and respectable of Sydney tradesmen were receivers of stolen goods; that in the time of one governor,

“the marriage ceremony fell into neglect, and dissolute habits
soon prevailed; rum became the regular and principal article of
traffic, and was universally drunk to excess”;

and that, when he left the colony in 1800, “_it was then in a state of deep demoralization_” (_Therry_, p. 71); that, under the rule of his successor, to quote Mr. Therry’s own description:

“The licentiousness that had prevailed in the time of Hunter was
carried to the highest pitch. Not only was undisguised concubinage
thought no shame, but the sale of wives was not an unfrequent
practice. A present owner of broad acres and large herds in New
South Wales is the offspring of a union strangely brought about by
the purchase of a wife from her husband for four gallons of rum”
(p. 72).

Lamentable as must have been the condition of a reformatory colony wherein the religious sentiment and all concern for a future life were entirely disregarded, its effects were more terrible to the Catholic portion of the convicts than to their Protestant fellow‐criminals. The latter, born blind, were not sensible of the blessing of which they were deprived. To them religion was a matter of the merest unconcern. The parson was one of the gentlefolk, nothing more. He made no claim of spiritual power. It was not likely that they should invest him with it. They felt no need of him in death, any more than they had throughout their lives. Indeed, they had all along been taught that it was the special birthright of an Englishman to die as independently as he had lived. It must be owned, therefore, that, as far as they were concerned, no privation was experienced nor any practical loss occasioned by the circumstance that only one Protestant minister was appointed in the colony during six years, and for another six years only two.

How different the case of the Catholic portion of the convicts! For them to be deprived of priestly ministration was a loss all but irreparable. The clear and rigid dogmatism of the church places the three future states of existence before her children with a positiveness and reality which the mysterious power of evil may enable them to brave, but never to ignore. The intermediate state of temporal punishment forbids the most loaded with crimes to abandon hope, even at the moment of dissolution. But for this salvation the sacraments are ordinarily essential, of which the priests, and only the priests, are the dispensers. To deprive, thus, of priestly ministrations those poor creatures who stood most in need of them, to drag them to despair and final impenitence—the only sin from whose guilt the sacraments are powerless to rescue the sinner—was a cruelty which would have been diabolical if it had been intentional.

About ten years after the settlement of the colony, the number of Catholic convicts was greatly increased by large deportations from Ireland after the unsuccessful insurrection of 1798. But they were a very different class of men from ordinary convicts. They were superior to the ordinary political derelicts. If the most brutal and insulting tyranny that ever goaded a people to rebellion can justify an insurrection against established authorities, that justification they had to the full. Those Irish exiles of ’98 were no more criminal than the ministry that arraigned them or the judges who pronounced their doom. The finer sensibilities of these men had not been blunted nor their domestic affection stifled by low associations and long habits of crime. They were, for the most part, men of blameless manners, and of a people remarkable for virtue. To such men the rude snapping asunder of the fondest heart‐ties, the being dragged away for ever from the old spot of home, endeared by all blissful and innocent memories, from the familiar scenes, the beloved faces, the cherished friends, the heart‐owned relatives, young and aged, from the graves of their ancestors, and the country of their birth, to be shipped off as criminals to the uttermost parts of the earth, with their country’s deadly enemies for their jailers, must have been a fate from which death would have been hailed as a deliverer. To deprive those unfortunate patriots of the consolations and benedictions of their religion was indeed to make them empty the cup of sorrow to its bitterest dregs. In the year 1829, about forty years after the commencement of transportation from Ireland, they numbered nearly ten thousand souls. Yet, we are informed by Mr. Therry,

“up to that time they were dependent solely on such ministrations
as could be rendered by a single priest, and for a considerable
portion of that period there was no priest in the colony.”

How different would have been the organization of the expedition, how far different its results, if the church had still owned England’s heart, and her statesmen had been Catholics! The most worldly and ill‐living of such would not have dreamed of equipping a colony without making full provision for the celebration of Christian worship and the ministrations of the church. It would have been their first care. Had they designed to make the colony subservient to the noble object of reforming those unfortunates whom society had cast out of its pale, nothing would have been advertently left undone to bring all the salutary influences of religion to bear upon them, and to place at their service every one of its supernatural aids. What is the church, in her actual working in the affairs of men, but a divinely organized reformatory system? Now a fundamental principle of that system is that forgiven crime is buried out of sight and out of mind. When the minister of the divine pardon has opened the doors of the eternal prison, and has stricken off the deadly fetters from the self‐condemning penitent, he who was just now kneeling at his side in bonds and death, together with all the crimes he has committed, are alike forgotten by him. He is to him quite a new and other man. And with the Christian benediction he sends him forth reinvested with the royalty of his birth and his consanguinity to God, to mingle, mayhap, if he correspond to the grace given, with the most virtuous on the earth, as though he had never broken its peace or given scandal to his brethren. Men are what their religion makes them. And no Catholic statesman would have sent out a convict colony to a distant shore without providing for such as would be reformed a destination where the past might be at once forgotten and repaired. The angels of the Gospel, inflamed with the noblest charity that ever dawned over the everlasting hills on an ice‐bound world, would have been scarcely ever absent from the prison cells, never weary of importuning their inmates to save themselves, and to reclaim their place amongst their fellows by a reformation which would at the same time restore them to their hopes as immortal men. Far from permitting to them every license of lust, and the indulgence of every criminal passion which did not interfere with jail discipline; by their moral reformation, and by it alone, would they have attempted their reformation as citizens. They would have been ever at hand to aid them with priestly counsels and the supernatural grace of the sacraments in those frequent falls and relapses of which nearly every history of reformation consists. And those who were sufficiently reformed to be able to conform thenceforth to the easy standard of public virtue would have found, in the new career to which they were committed, precisely the same divine system, with its supernatural aids and exhaustless charities ready to carry on in their behalf the work of restoration, through the love of man, to the reward of God.

Even in the case of those pitiable beings, in whose crime‐clogged souls the loving accents of religion appeared to awake no echoes, never would the indiscriminating and wholesale torture of the lash have been summoned to its unholy and brutalizing work to deepen still more their moral degradation and place their reformation for ever out of hope. Restrained as they were from doing further mischief to society, the church, whose heart, as of a human mother, yearns with most fondness towards the most vicious of her children, would never have abandoned, still less have ill‐ treated, the poor outcasts. She would have hoped against hope. Nor would she for one moment have ceased her importunities, her ministrations, and her prayers, until final impenitence had taken away the unhappy beings for ever from the counsels of mercy, or human obduracy had capitulated, at the hour of death, to the exhaustless love of God.

The Veil Withdrawn.

Translated, By Permission, From The French Of Mme. Craven, Author Of “A Sister’s Story,” “Fleurange,” Etc.

XXXIX.

The following day Lando, at an unusually early hour, entered the little sitting‐room next my chamber where I commonly remained in the morning. He looked so much graver than usual that I thought he had come to tell me there was some obstacle in the way of his matrimonial prospects. But it was once more of my affairs, and not of his, he wished to speak.

“Dear cousin,” said he without any preamble, “I come at this unusual hour because I wish to see you alone. I have something important to tell you.”

“Something that concerns you, Lando?”

“No, it concerns you and Lorenzo.”

My heart gave a leap. What was he about to tell me? What new hope was to be dashed to the ground?

“Great goodness!” said I, giving immediate utterance to the only object of my mortal terror, “have you come to tell me Donna Faustina is at Naples, and Lorenzo has left me again?”

“Donna Faustina? Oh! no. Would to heaven it were merely a question of her, and that you had nothing more serious to apprehend on Lorenzo’s part than another foolish journey, were she to lead him beyond the Black Sea! No, it is not a question of your husband’s heart, which preoccupies you more than he deserves, but of his property and yours.”