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When a young man, Richard Hawkins was guilty of the
heinous crime of betraying the daughter of a respectable farmer in the
west of Galloway, of the name of Emily Robson. As he yet loved the
injured maiden, he would have married her, but in this he was
determinedly opposed by
her relatives, and particularly by her only brother, betwixt whom and
himself an inveterate hostility had, from various causes, been growing
up since their earliest boyhood. From remorse partly, and shame and
disappointment, and partly from other causes, Hawkins hereupon left his
home and went abroad; but after making a considerable sum of money he
returned to Scotland, determined to use every remonstrance to win over
Emily's friends to allow him yet by marriage to make reparation to the
gentle maiden, the remembrance of whose beauty and faithful confiding
spirit had unceasingly haunted him in a foreign land. He arrived first
at Glasgow, and proceeded thence to Edinburgh, where he purposed to stay
a week or a fortnight before going southward to his native county, in
which also Emily Robson resided.
During his stay in the metropolis, having been one
evening invited to sup at the house of a gentleman, originally from the
same county with himself, scarcely had he taken his seat in his host's
parlour, when Emily's brother entered, and, instantly recognizing him,
advanced with a face of grim wrath, denounced him as a villain, declared
he would not sit a moment in his company, and to make good his
declaration, instantly turned on his heel and left the house. The
violent spirit of Hawkins was in a moment stung to madness by this rash
and unseasonable insolence, which was offered him, moreover, before a
number of gentlemen; he rose, craved their leave for a moment, that he
might follow, and show Mr Robson his mistake; and sallying out of the
house, without his hat, he overtook his aggressor on the street, tapped
him on the shoulder, and thus bespoke him, with a grim smile:—"Why, sir,
give me leave to propound to you that this same word and exit of yours
are most preciously insolent. With your leave, now, I must have you
back, gently to unsay me a word or two; or, by heaven! this night your
blood shall wash out the imputation!"
"This hour—this hour!" replied Robson, in a hoarse
compressed whisper; "my soul craves to grapple with you, and put our
mutual affair to a mortal arbitrament. Hark ye, Hawkins, you are a
stranger in this city, I presume, and cannot reasonably be expected
easily to provide yourself with a second; moreover, no one would back
such a villain;—now, will you follow me this moment to my lodgings,
accept from my hand one of a pair of pistols, and let us, without
faither formality, retire to a convenient place, and do ourselves a
pleasure and a justice. I am weary of living under the same sun with
you, and if I can shed your foul blood beneath yon chaste stars of God,
I would willingly die for it. Dare you follow me?—and, quickly, before
those fellows think of looking after us?"
To Hawkins' boiling heart of indignation 'twas no
hard task so to follow, and the above proposal of Robson was strictly
and instantly followed up. We must notice here particularly, that, as
the parties were about to leave the house, a letter was put into
Robson's hand, who, seeing that it was from his mother, and bore the
outward notification of mourning, craved Hawkins' permission to read it,
which he did with a twinkling in his eye, and a working, as of deep
grief, in the muscles of his face ; but in a minute he violently crushed
the letter, put it into his pocket, and, turning anew to his foe with
glaring eyes of anger, told him that all was ready. And now we shall
only state generally, that within an hour from the first provocation of
the evening, this mortal and irregular duel was settled, and left Robson
shot through the body by his antagonist .
No sooner did Hawkins see him fall, than horror and
remorse for his deed rushed upon him ; he ran to the prostrate youth,
attempted to raise him up, but dared not offer pity or ask forgiveness,
for which his soul yet panted. The wounded man rejected his
assistance—waved him off, and thus faintly but fearfully spoke: — "Now,
mine enemy! I will tell you, that you may sooner know the curse of God,
which shall for ever cling and warp itself round all the red cords of
your heart. That letter from my mother, which you saw me read, told me
of the death of that sister Emily whom I so loved; whom you—oh, God!—who
never recovered from your villany. And my father, too!—Off, fiend, nor
mock me! You shall not so triumph—you shall not see me die!" So saying,
the wounded youth, who was lying on his back, with his pale writhen
features upturned, and dimly seen in the twilight, with a convulsive
effort now threw himself round, with his face upon the grass.
In a fearful agony stood Hawkins, twisting his hands,
not knowing whether again to attempt raising his victim, or to run to
the city for a surgeon. The former he at length did, and found no
resistance; for, alas! the unhappy youth was dead. The appearance of two
or three individuals now making towards the bloody spot, which was near
the suburbs of the town, and to which, in all probability, they had been
drawn by the report of the pistols, roused Hawkins, for the first time,
to a sense of his own danger. He quickly left the ground, dashed through
the fields, and, without distinctly calculating his route, instinctively
turned towards his native district.
As he proceeded onwards, he began to consider the
bearings of his difficult situation, and at last resolved to hasten on
through the country, to lay his case before his excellent friend Frank
Dillon, who was the only son of a gentleman in the western parts of
Galloway, and who, he knew, was at present residing with his father.
Full of the most riotous glee, and nimble-wilted as Mercutio, Frank, he
was aware, could be no less gravely wise as an adviser in a difficult
emergency, and he determined, in the present case, to be wholly ruled by
his opinion. Invigorated from thus having settled for himself a definite
course, he walked swiftly forward through the night, which shone with
the finest beauty of the moon. Yet what peace to the murderer, whose red
title not the fairest duellist, who has slain a human being, can to his
own conscience reduce? The cold glittering leaves on the trees, struck
with a quick, momentary gust, made him start as he passed; and the
shadowy foot and figure of the lover, coming round from the back window
of the lone cottage, was to his startled apprehension the avenger of
blood at hand. As he looked afar along the glittering road, the black
fir trees upon the edge of the moor seemed men coming running down to
meet him; and the long howl of some houseless cur, and the distant hoof
of the traveller, which struck his listening ear with two or three
beatings, seemed all in the track of pursuit and vengeance.
Morning came, and to the weary fugitive was agreeably
cloudy; but the sun rose upon him in the forenoon, shining from between
the glassy, glistering clouds with far greater heat than it does from a
pure blue sky. Hawkins had now crossed many a broad acre of the weary
moorlands, fatigued and thirsty, his heart beating in his ears, and not
a drop of water that he could see to sprinkle the dry pulses of his
bosom, when he came to a long morass, which barred his straightforward
path. Mis first business was to quench his thirst from a dull stank,
overgrown with paddowpipe, and black with myriads of tadpoles. There,
finding himself so faint from fatigue that he could not brook the idea
of going round by the end of the moss, and being far less able to make
his way through the middle of it, by leaping from hagg to hagg,
he threw himself down on the sunny side of some long reeds, and fell
fast asleep.
He was waked by the screaming of lapwings, and the
noise of a neighbouring bittern) to a feeling of violent throbbing,
headache, and nausea, which were probably owing to the sun's having beat
upon him whilst he lay asleep, aggravated by the reflection from the
reeds. He arose, but finding himself quite unable to pursue his journey,
again threw himself down on a small any brow of land, to get what breeze
might be stirring abroad. There were several companies of people at work
digging peats in the moss, and one
party now sat down very near him to
their dinner. One of them, a young woman, had passed so near him, as to
be able to guess, from his countenance, that he was unwell ; and in a
few minutes, with the fine charity of womanhood, she came to him with
some food, of which, to satisfy her kindness, rather than his own
hunger, he ate a little. The air changed in the afternoon, and streaming
clouds of hail crossed over that wild country, yet he lay still. Party
after party left the moss, and yet he was there. He made, indeed, a show
of leaving the place at a quick rate, to dissappoint the fears of the
people who had seen him at noon, and who, as they again came near to
gather up their supernumerary clothes, were evidently perplexed on his
account, which they showed by looking first towards him and then at each
other. It was all he could do to get quite out of their sight beyond a
little eminence; and there, once more, he lay down in utter prostration
of mind and body.
Twilight began to darken upon the
pools of that desolate place. The wild birds were gone to their heathy
nests, all save the curlew, whose bravura was still sung over the fells,
and borne far away into the dim and silent night. At length a tall,
powerful-looking man came stepping through the moss, and as he passed
near the poor youth, asked, in slow speech, who he was. In the reaction
of nature, Hawkins was, in a moment, anxious about his situation, and
replied to him that he had fallen sick on his way, and was unable to go
in quest of a resting-place for the night. Approaching and turning
himself round to the youth as he arose, the genius of the place had him
on his back in a moment, and went off with him carelessly and in silence
over the heath. In-about half an hour they came to a lonely cottage,
which the kind creature entered; and, setting the young man down,
without the least appearance of fatigue on his part, "Here, gudewife."
said he, "is a bairn t'ye, that I hae foun' i' the moss: now, let us see
ye be gude to him." Either this injunction was very effective, or it was
not at all necessary; for, had the youth been her own son, come from a
far country to see her, this hostess of the cottage could not have
treated him more kindly. From his little conversation during the
evening, her husband, like most very bulky men, appeared to be of dull
intellect; but there was a third personage in the composition of his
household, a younger brother, a very little man,—the flower of the
flock,—who made ample amends for his senior brother's deficiencies as a
talker. A smattering of Church-history had filled his soul with a
thousand stories of persecution and martyrdom, and, from some old
history of America, he had gained a little knowledge of Upper Canada,
for which, Hawkins was during the night repeatedly given to understand,
he was once on the very point of setting out, an abiding embryo of bold
travel, which, in his own eye, seemed to invest him with all the honours
and privileges of bona fide voyagers. His guest had a thousand
questions put to him on these interesting topics, less for his answers,
it was evident, than for an opportunity to the little man of setting
forth his own information. All this was tolerably fair; but it was truly
disgusting when the little oracle took the Bible after supper, and, in
place of his elder brother, who was otherwise also the head of the
family, performed the religious services of the evening, presuming to
add a comment to the chapter which he read; to enforce which, his elbow
was drawn back to the sharpest angle of edification, from which, ever
and anon unslinging itself like a shifting rhomboid, it forced forward
the stiff information in many a pompous instalment. The pertinacious
forefinger was at work too; and before it trembled the mystic Babylon,
which, in a side argument, that digit was uplifted to denounce.
Moreover, the whole lecture was given in a squeaking, pragmatic voice,
which sounded like the sharping of thatchers' knives.
Next morning the duellest renewed his journey, hoping
against eveningtide to reach" Dillon's house, which he guessed could not
now be more than forty miles distant. About mid-aflernoon, as he was
going through a small hamlet of five or six cottages, he stepped into
one of them, and requested a little water to drink. There was a hushed
solemnity, he could see in a moment, throughout the little apartment
into which, rather too unceremoniously, he had entered; and a
kind-looking matron, in a dark robe, whispered in his ear, as she gave
him a porringer of sweet water, with a little oatmeal sprinkled upon it,
that an only daughter of the house, a fine young woman, was lying "a
corpse." Without noticing his presence, and indeed with her face hid,
sat the mother doubtless of the maiden, heedless of the whispered
consolations of two or three officious matrons, and racking m that full
and intense sorrow with which strangers cannot intermeddle. The sloping
beams of the declining sun shone beautifully in through a small lattice,
illumining a half-decayed nosegay of flowers which stood on the sunny
whitewashed sill—emblem of a more sorrowful decay!—and after traversing
the middle of the apartment, with a thin deep bar of light, peopled by a
maze of dancing motes, struck into the white bed, where lay something
covered up and awfully indistinct, like sanctified thing not to be gazed
at, which the fugitive's fascinated eye yet tried to
shape into the elegant body of the maiden, as she lay before her
virgin sheets purer than they, with the salt above her still and unvexed
bosom. The restricted din of boys at play—for that buoyant age is yet
truly reverential, and feels
most deeply the solemn occasion of death—was heard
faint and aloof from the house of mourning. This, and the lonely chirrup
of a single sparrow from the thatch; the soft purring of the cat at the
sunny pane; the muflled tread of the mourners over the threshold; and
the audible grief of that poor mother, seemed, instead of interruption,
rather parts of the solemn stillness.
As Hawkins was going out, after lingering a minute in
this sacred interior, he met, in the narrow passage which led to the
door, a man with the coffin, on the lid of which he read, as it was
pushed up to his very face, "Emily Robson, aged 22." The heart of the
murderer—the seducer—was in a moment as if steeped in the benumbing
waters of petrifaction ; he was horrified; he would fain have passed,
but could not for want of room ; and as the coffin was not to be
withdrawn in accommodation to him, he was pushed again into the interior
of the cottage to encounter a look of piercing recognition from Emily's
afflicted mother, who had started up on hearing the hollow grating of
the coffin as it struck occasionally on the wails of the narrow
entrance. "Take him away—take him away— take him away!" she screamed,
when she saw Hawkins, and pressed her face down on the white bed of
death. As for the youth, who was fearfully conscious of another bloody
woe which had not yet reached her heart, and of which he was still the
author, and who saw, moreover, that this poor mother was now come to
poverty, probably from his own first injury against the peace of her
family, he needed not to be told to depart. With conscience, that truest
conducting-rod, flashing its moral electricities of shame and fear, and
with knees knocking against each other, he stumbled out of the house,
and making his way by chance to an idle quarry, overgrown with weeds, he
there threw himself down, with his face on the ground. In this situation
he lay the whole night and all next forenoon; and in the afternoon—for
he had occasionally risen to look for the assembling of the funeral
train—he joined the small group who carried his Emily to the churchyard,
and saw her young body laid in the grave. Oh ! who can cast away
carelessly, like a useless thing, the finely-moulded clay, perfumed with
the lingering beauty of warm motions, sweet graces, and young charities
I But had not the young man, think ye, tenfold reason to weep for her
whom he now saw laid down within the dark shadow of the grave?
In the evening, he found his way to Frank Dillon's;
met his friend by chance at a little distance from his father's house,
and told him at once his unhappy situation. "My father," replied Frank,
"cannot be an adviser here, because he is a Justice of the Peace. But he
has been at London for some time, and I do not expect him home till
to-morrow; so you can go with me to our house for this night, where we
shall deliberate what next must be done in this truly sad affair of
yours. Come on."
It is unnecessary for us to explain at length the
circumstances which frustrated the friendly intentions of Dillon, and
which enabled the officers of justice to trace Hawkins to his place of
concealment. They arrived that very evening; and, notwithstanding the
efforts of Frank to save his friend, secured the unhappy duellist, who,
within two days afterwards, found himself in Edinburgh, securely lodged
in jail.
The issue of Hawkins trial was that he was condemned
to death as a murderer. This severe sentence of the law was, however,
commuted into that of banishment for seven years. But he never again
returned to his native country. And it must be told of him also, that no
happiness ever shone upon this after-life of his. Independent of his
first crime, which brought a beautiful young woman prematurely to the I
grave, he had broken rashly "into the I bloody
house of life," and, in the language of Holy Writ, "slain a young man to
his hurt."
Oh! for that still and quiet conscience —those third
heavens within a man— wherein he can soar within himself and be at
peace, where the image of God shines down, never dislimned nor long hid
by those wild racks and deep continents of gloom which come over the
soul of the blood-guilty man! |
