Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1353 page)

I forgot myself once more — I lost my temper.

“Leave the room,” I said. “Your unworthy hands will not touch the poor baby again. She is provided for.”

“I don’t believe you!” the wretch burst out. “Who has taken the child?”

A quiet voice answered: “
I
have taken her.”

We both looked round and saw the Minister standing in the open doorway, with the child in his arms. The ordeal that he had gone through in the condemned cell was visible in his face; he looked miserably haggard and broken. I was eager to know if his merciful interest in the Prisoner had purified her guilty soul — but at the same time I was afraid, after what he had but too plainly suffered, to ask him to enter into details.

“Only one word,” I said. “Are your anxieties at rest?”

“God’s mercy has helped me,” he answered. “I have not spoken in vain. She believes; she repents; she has confessed the crime.”

After handing the written and signed confession to me, he approached the venomous creature, still lingering in the room to hear what passed between us. Before I could stop him, he spoke to her, under a natural impression that he was addressing the Prisoner’s servant.

“I am afraid you will be disappointed,” he said, “when I tell you that your services will no longer be required. I have reasons for placing the child under the care of a nurse of my own choosing.”

She listened with an evil smile.

“I know who furnished you with your reasons,” she answered. “Apologies are quite needless, so far as I am concerned. If you had proposed to me to look after the new member of your family there, I should have felt it my duty to myself to have refused. I am not a nurse — I am an independent single lady. I see by your dress that you are a clergyman. Allow me to present myself as a mark of respect to your cloth. I am Miss Elizabeth Chance. May I ask the favor of your name?”

Too weary and too preoccupied to notice the insolence of her manner, the Minister mentioned his name. “I am anxious,” he said, “to know if the child has been baptized. Perhaps you can enlighten me?”

Still insolent, Miss Elizabeth Chance shook her head carelessly. “I never heard — and, to tell you the truth, I never cared to hear — whether she was christened or not. Call her by what name you like, I can tell you this — you will find your adopted daughter a heavy handful.”

The Minister turned to me. “What does she mean?”

“I will try to tell you,” Miss Chance interposed. “Being a clergyman, you know who Deborah was? Very well. I am Deborah now; and
I
prophesy.” She pointed to the child. “Remember what I say, reverend sir! You will find the tigress-cub take after its mother.”

With those parting words, she favored us with a low curtsey, and left the room.

CHAPTER VI. THE DOCTOR DOUBTS.

The Minister looked at me in an absent manner; his attention seemed to have been wandering. “What was it Miss Chance said?” he asked.

Before I could speak, a friend’s voice at the door interrupted us. The Doctor, returning to me as he had promised, answered the Minister’s question in these words:

“I must have passed the person you mean, sir, as I was coming in here; and I heard her say: ‘You will find the tigress-cub take after its mother.’ If she had known how to put her meaning into good English, Miss Chance — that is the name you mentioned, I think — might have told you that the vices of the parents are inherited by the children. And the one particular parent she had in her mind,” the Doctor continued, gently patting the child’s cheek, “was no doubt the mother of this unfortunate little creature — who may, or may not, live to show you that she comes of a bad stock and inherits a wicked nature.”

I was on the point of protesting against my friend’s interpretation, when the Minister stopped me.

“Let me thank you, sir, for your explanation,” he said to the Doctor. “As soon as my mind is free, I will reflect on what you have said. Forgive me, Mr. Governor,” he went on, “if I leave you, now that I have placed the Prisoner’s confession in your hands. It has been an effort to me to say the little I have said, since I first entered this room. I can think of nothing but that unhappy criminal, and the death that she must die to-morrow.”

“Does she wish you to be present?” I asked.

“She positively forbids it. ‘After what you have done for me,’ she said, ‘the least I can do in return is to prevent your being needlessly distressed.’ She took leave of me; she kissed the little girl for the last time — oh, don’t ask me to tell you about it! I shall break down if I try. Come, my darling!” He kissed the child tenderly, and took her away with him.

“That man is a strange compound of strength and weakness,” the Doctor remarked. “Did you notice his face, just now? Nine men out of ten, suffering as he suffered, would have failed to control themselves. Such resolution as his
may
conquer the difficulties that are in store for him yet.”

It was a trial of my temper to hear my clever colleague justifying, in this way, the ignorant prediction of an insolent woman.

“There are exceptions to all rules,” I insisted. “And why are the virtues of the parents not just as likely to descend to the children as the vices? There was a fund of good, I can tell you, in that poor baby’s father — though I don’t deny that he was a profligate man. And even the horrible mother — as you heard just now — has virtue enough left in her to feel grateful to the man who has taken care of her child. These are facts; you can’t dispute them.”

The Doctor took out his pipe. “Do you mind my smoking?” he asked. “Tobacco helps me to arrange my ideas.”

I gave him the means of arranging his ideas; that is to say, I gave him the match-box. He blew some preliminary clouds of smoke and then he answered me:

“For twenty years past, my friend, I have been studying the question of hereditary transmission of qualities; and I have found vices and diseases descending more frequently to children than virtue and health. I don’t stop to ask why: there is no end to that sort of curiosity. What I have observed is what I tell you; no more and no less. You will say this is a horribly discouraging result of experience, for it tends to show that children come into the world at a disadvantage on the day of their birth. Of course they do. Children are born deformed; children are born deaf, dumb, or blind; children are born with the seeds in them of deadly diseases. Who can account for the cruelties of creation? Why are we endowed with life — only to end in death? And does it ever strike you, when you are cutting your mutton at dinner, and your cat is catching its mouse, and your spider is suffocating its fly, that we are all, big and little together, born to one certain inheritance — the privilege of eating each other?”

“Very sad,” I admitted. “But it will all be set right in another world.”

“Are you quite sure of that?” the Doctor asked.

“Quite sure, thank God! And it would be better for you if you felt about it as I do.”

“We won’t dispute, my dear Governor. I don’t scoff at comforting hopes; I don’t deny the existence of occasional compensations. But I do see, nevertheless, that Evil has got the upper hand among us, on this curious little planet. Judging by my observation and experience, that ill-fated baby’s chance of inheriting the virtues of her parents is not to be compared with her chances of inheriting their vices; especially if she happens to take after her mother.
There
the virtue is not conspicuous, and the vice is one enormous fact. When I think of the growth of that poisonous hereditary taint, which may come with time — when I think of passions let loose and temptations lying in ambush — I see the smooth surface of the Minister’s domestic life with dangers lurking under it which make me shake in my shoes. God! what a life I should lead, if I happened to be in his place, some years hence. Suppose I said or did something (in the just exercise of my parental authority) which offended my adopted daughter. What figure would rise from the dead in my memory, when the girl bounced out of the room in a rage? The image of her mother would be the image I should see. I should remember what her mother did when
she
was provoked; I should lock my bedroom door, in my own house, at night. I should come down to breakfast with suspicions in my cup of tea, if I discovered that my adopted daughter had poured it out. Oh, yes; it’s quite true that I might be doing the girl a cruel injustice all the time; but how am I to be sure of that? I am only sure that her mother was hanged for one of the most merciless murders committed in our time. Pass the match-box. My pipe’s out, and my confession of faith has come to an end.”

It was useless to dispute with a man who possessed his command of language. At the same time, there was a bright side to the poor Minister’s prospects which the Doctor had failed to see. It was barely possible that I might succeed in putting my positive friend in the wrong. I tried the experiment, at any rate.

“You seem to have forgotten,” I reminded him, “that the child will have every advantage that education can offer to her, and will be accustomed from her earliest years to restraining and purifying influences, in a clergyman’s household.”

Now that he was enjoying the fumes of tobacco, the Doctor was as placid and sweet-tempered as a man could be.

“Quite true,” he said.

“Do you doubt the influence of religion?” I asked sternly.

He answered, sweetly: “Not at all”

“Or the influence of kindness?”

“Oh, dear, no!”

“Or the force of example?”

“I wouldn’t deny it for the world.”

I had not expected this extraordinary docility. The Doctor had got the upper hand of me again — a state of things that I might have found it hard to endure, but for a call of duty which put an end to our sitting. One of the female warders appeared with a message from the condemned cell. The Prisoner wished to see the Governor and the Medical Officer.

“Is she ill?” the Doctor inquired.

“No, sir.”

“Hysterical? or agitated, perhaps?”

“As easy and composed, sir, as a person can be.”

We set forth together for the condemned cell.

CHAPTER VII. THE MURDERESS CONSULTS THE AUTHORITIES.

There was a considerate side to my friend’s character, which showed itself when the warder had left us.

He was especially anxious to be careful of what he said to a woman in the Prisoner’s terrible situation; especially in the event of her having been really subjected to the influence of religious belief. On the Minister’s own authority, I declared that there was every reason to adopt this conclusion; and in support of what I had said I showed him the confession. It only contained a few lines, acknowledging that she had committed the murder and that she deserved her sentence. “From the planning of the crime to the commission of the crime, I was in my right senses throughout. I knew what I was doing.” With that remarkable disavowal of the defense set up by her advocate, the confession ended.

My colleague read the paper, and handed it back to me without making any remark. I asked if he suspected the Prisoner of feigning conversion to please the Minister.

“She shall not discover it,” he answered, gravely, “if I do.”

It would not be true to say that the Doctor’s obstinacy had shaken my belief in the good result of the Minister’s interference. I may, however, acknowledge that I felt some misgivings, which were not dispelled when I found myself in the presence of the Prisoner.

I had expected to see her employed in reading the Bible. The good book was closed and was not even placed within her reach. The occupation to which she was devoting herself astonished and repelled me.

Some carelessness on the part of the attendant had left on the table the writing materials that had been needed for her confession. She was using them now — when death on the scaffold was literally within a few hours of her — to sketch a portrait of the female warder, who was on the watch! The Doctor and I looked at each other; and now the sincerity of her repentance was something that I began to question, too.