I None of the early chapters of the book which he
began shortly before his death, and never finished, Stevenson has drawn a picture of a murderer arraigned in the dock before the " Hanging Judge," Weir of Hermiston. The story of the "misbegotten caitiff" whom Hermiston savagely sentences to death, jeering at his ugliness and paltriness, " was one of disgrace and vice and cowardice, the very nakedness of crime ; and the creature heard and it seemed at times as though be understood—as if at times be forgot the horror of the place he stood in, and remembered the shame of what had brought Min there. He kept his bead bowed' and his hands clutched upon the rail : his hair dropped in hia eyes, and It times he flung it back ; and now he glanced about the audience in a sudden fellness of terror, and now looked in the face of his Judge and gulped. There was pinned about
his throat a piece of dingy flannel With a trait of human •nature that caught at the beholder's breath, he was tending a sore throat."
It is a picture which may have occurred to the minds of some who have read the details of the extraordinary story pieced together before the Kilburn Coroner's Court on Mon- day. The " Kensal Rise Tragedy," as the newspapers have called it, is in some respects more remarkable even than the Moat Farm case, which, curiously enough, was occupying public attention just a year ago, shortly after the crime which came to light last week was committed. For although in essen- tial points the characters of the two criminals involved are alike. the man who ended his life last week rather than face
committed four years before. - Crossman, the Kensal Rise criminal, like Dougal, his precursor in crime, seems to have been a man who allowed nothing that this world holds to standrin the way of his desire; to whom the Sixth Command- ment was an empty sound; who was not even afraid, when other men would have been shaken with terror, to realise day after day that he had committed the one great crime that cannot be concealed. He was a man of only thirty years; yet he had gone through the ceremony of marriage with seven. women, one of whom was happy enough to die a natural death ; five are still living ; he took the life of one when she had not been married to him for a day. It is the means which he took to, bide what would not be hidden which make his case remarkable. Actually living as he was at the time with another woman, it was imperative to get rid of the body of his victim. He thrust the body in a trunk, bought cement and poured it round it, and placed the trunk in a cupboard ; there for nearly 'fifteen-months it lay, until the suspicions of a lodger brought the police on the scene, when the man, unable to escape, ended his life.
If anything is certain, it is certain that there must have been something in the man that is not in ordinary men; something superhumanly courageous, perhaps ; or was it an almost unthinkable callousness that took him through the plain, humdrum details of everyday life for fifteen months after he knew what he had become ? How many men willingly enter even the peacefullest of death chambers for the first time ? Yet this man, not, as one must suppose, aghast with the horror of his new possession, was able actually to live in, and to admitothers to, the house where murder shrieked at him day after day and night after night for more than a year. Was be strong enough not to listen, or did he not hear? He must have heard at the end; but did it never happen long before the end came that he was driven screaming out of his sleep by night, so that others knew that there was some reason why he must wake ? Did he never catch a questioning glance from a bystander by day,—a glance which to an innocent man would seem natural enough, but which to him meant suspicion of his horribly great secret? If he was able to go about the ordinary day's work as ordinary men go, did he go about it always so that none of those whom he met instinctively differentiated him from themselves ? Was he kind to animals ?. Would he pat a dog, for instance; if it jumped up at him ? He had to eat and to drink, and so to come, when buying things to eat and to drink, into a stark, direct relation with the main, common facts of life. Did' he wonder, when buying food and liquor, what those to whom he paid money would do if they kneW all about him ; how he stood in relation to the community in which he mixed every day? If a friend of one of the men and women whom he met day by • day happened to die, would he feel and express sorrow with the friends who were left? Was there any emotion always deeply felt by the sane man of clear brain and clean soul which he could not or did not feel ?
Stevenson's picture of the criminal flinching before the "Hanging Judge," knowing that he must die before his time, yet carefully tending so small a matter as a sore throat, suggests at least part of the answer. But has any writer come nearer to the' right summing up of the whole matter, to the proper weighing of the straw in the balance that separates the condemned from the potential criminal, than Carlyle? " From the purpose of crime to the act of crime there is an abyss ; wonderful to think of. The finger lies on the pistOl ; but the man is not yet a murderer : nay, his whole nature staggering at such consummation, is there not a confused pause rather,—one last instant of possibility for him ? Not yet 'a murderer; it is at the mercy of light trifles whether the most fixed idea may not yet become unfixed. One slight twitch of a, muscle, the death-flash harsh; and he is it, and will for Eternity be it; and Earth has now become a penal Tartarus for him ; his horizon girdled now, not with golden hope, but with red flames of remorse; voices from the depths of Nature sounding, Woe, woe on him t Of such stuff
we are all made; on such powder-mines of as guilt
and 'criminality,—' if God restrained not,' as is well said,— does the purest of us walk." It is impossible to read those lines without wondering whether they may not have been
also read by some one whose finger once "lay on the pistol," fOr whom there was aotually " one last instant of possibility " ; yet who, that instant-having passed, lived out his ideas a man at least guiltless of blood. He might, in a second of time, have become "it," and "it" for "Eternity"; he did not. That awful moment does not, mercifully, come to many out of the millions of inhabitants of those lands where the Sixth. Com- mandment has rung in men's ears for centuries; but is it not universally true, even of civilised communities, that hundreds of men innocent to-day of the greatest of crimes have at some time stood as Massa stood before he killed his enemy ? " He looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand." They have "looked this way and that way," but have seen ten, or a hundred, or thousands of men watching them ; and, afraid of the men they saw, they have gone on their way ; they have not had to bear the questions that Moses heard, so that, filled with the same terror that is felt by the meanest criminal to- day, he "feared, and said, Surely this thing is known."
, Yet if the same man who gave to the Hebrew race those laws which have swayed hundreds of millions of men for thousands of years was also guilty of. the greatest crime which those laws forbid, he has still always been thought of first and fore- most as a Man. His crime—unless we can argue that his people were at war with the people of Egypt, and that he slew as men slay in battle, without taint or stain of any sort on heart or conscience—was the same crime that has left other men since his day gazing at the inert clay which in a second of time has become theirs, the daninosa hereditas that the sudden blow has brought them without the easy sand of an Egyptian desert to solve the deafening question: " What will you do ? "—yet he lived on, to be the great leader of his race and the founder of his race's laws. Could any kind of modern prison-training, any offer of a second chance, give back to the .man on whose forehead the Mark has been set some part of the aspirations of the happier man who has not been tempted ? It is not easy to ask the question with hope or faith when contemplating such a life of crime as that which ended last week ; for this was a case where the man seems to have been choked by the criminal. Jekyll became Hyde for ever. The question admits of no direct proof or disproof ; but one thing, at least, can never be given back to the man guilty of the greatest of crimes,—the outlook upon life and men which was his before, in Carlyle's terrible language, he became "it"
for "Eternity."
FISHERS IN THE BAY.
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