Story of My Life Part 69

The heat of that day was awful, a broiling sun and not a breath of air.

We had a little room to meet in at the hotel. Almost immediately I was hurried by my solicitor to the room where our senior counsel, the great Hawkins, was breakfasting at the end of a long table. He complained of the immense ma.s.s of evidence he had had to go through. He said--what I knew--that such a trial must expose terrible family scandals--that it would be a disgrace not to s.n.a.t.c.h at any chance of bringing it to a close--that probably the judge would give it for private investigation to some other Queen's counsellor--that, in fact, it was never likely to _be_ a trial.

When I came down from Mr. Hawkins, Mary Stanley and I were taken to court. There were so many cases to be tried, that ours could not come on for some time. As Leycester Penrhyn was there, who was chairman of the Quarter Sessions at Guildford, we were given places on the raised da?s behind the judge, and there we all sat waiting through many hours. In that intensely hot weather, the court-house, with its high timber roof and many open windows, was far cooler than the outer air, and we did not suffer from the heat. But the judge, Baron Martin, whom I have heard described as far more at home on a racecourse than on the judgment-seat, was suffering violently from diarrh?a, was most impatient of the cases he had to try, and at last s.n.a.t.c.hed his wig from his head and flung it down upon the ground beside him.

About three o'clock in the afternoon we were a.s.sured that it was quite impossible our case could be brought on that day, as there were still so many others to be tried, and we were advised to go out and rest. So Mary Stanley and I went back to the hotel and remained there in a cool room.

Presently, to our horror, a messenger came running down from the court and said, "Your case is on, and has been on twenty minutes already." We rushed to the court and found the whole scene changed. All the approaches to the court were crowded, literally choked up with witnesses and Roman Catholic spectators. The court itself was packed to overflowing. As I was hurried through the crowd, I recognised the individuals forming the large group of figures immediately behind the judge. There were Pierina of the Precious Blood and her attendant nuns in their long black veils and scarlet girdles; there, in her quaint peaked head-dress, was the nun of the Misericorde who had watched through the illness; there was the burly figure of Mr. Monteith; the sallow face of Mrs. Dunlop; her husband the Admiral; Mrs. Montgomery, beautiful still; Lady Lothian in her deep mourning and looking very sad at being subp?naed, which was a terrible pain to her; Dr. Squires, Mr. Seyer, and Miss Bowles.

When I was brought in, all seemed to be confusion, every one speaking at once; Mr. Hawkins was in vain trying to put in a word, the judge was declaiming that he would have an end of the trial, whilst Serjeant Parry for the prosecution was in a loud voice reading the letter to Mrs.

Montgomery and giving his comments upon it.

The proceedings had commenced by the judge saying that he considered the case one which it would be most undesirable to discuss in a public court; and suggesting, indeed trying to enforce, that it should be left to the arbitration of some friend of the family. Repeatedly Baron Martin urged the expediency of a private investigation, saying that he "felt it his duty to make the suggestion, and that he thought the learned counsel (Parry) might act upon it." But the lawyers for the opposition refused any compromise whatever, for they knew what the evidence of Pierina and the servants was to be.

Serjeant Parry then opened his speech by describing between whom the action was taking place. He drew a picture of the nominal prosecutor's life in which he dwelt on "the brilliant examination at Sandhurst," but touched lightly upon the time which he had pa.s.sed in the gaieties both of the Continent and of this country, after which he became "not embarra.s.sed, but reduced in circ.u.mstances." He then said that Esmeralda had recently had a tolerable fortune, and was doubtless "supposed at her death to be in possession of it, but she was not, for she entered into speculations which had proved unsuccessful, so that she died a comparatively poor woman." He then described the death-bed will. He a.s.serted that the only cause of the death was inflammation of the bowels. He then said that he should proceed to read the letter, "supplementing it with evidence to prove that the defendant was actuated by the wickedest malice."

It was at this point that we arrived in court. When a little silence was obtained, Parry began to read the letter, and having concluded the first sentence, said, "When the defendant states that a report has been circulated in London, &c., he states a deliberate falsehood. No such report ever was heard by him, and I will not say it is the effect of his imagination, it is simply an invention for the purpose of damaging the character of his brother."[386]

Serjeant Parry then read the paragraph saying that in the first will Francis was not even alluded to. "I have reason to believe that this also is totally false," he said, and that with the will itself lying open upon the table before him.

Parry pa.s.sed over the third paragraph of the letter, without any criticism except an absolute denial, but he read a note written by my sister before she received Francis' fatal letter, in proof of the affectionate terms on which they were living. That the "mention of his name made her scream with horror," he declared to be utterly false, and he a.s.serted (for the first time stating facts) that the Abbess Pierina would deny that any message was given by my sister to _her_. Finally, Parry denied that there was any truth in the statement that Francis had received money from his sister, beyond the sum of ?300.

As Serjeant Parry concluded his speech, Mrs. Montgomery was called into the witness-box. While the preliminary questions were being put to her, the confusion in court increased; a letter was brought in to Mr.

Harrison and handed on by him to Mr. Hawkins. It was the letter from Monsignor Paterson, written on Sat.u.r.day evening, which announced that Pierina would deny and belie the deposition he had made. Immediately Mr.

Hawkins turned round to me and said, "Our cause has received a fatal blow; the Abbess Pierina is about to deny all the evidence she has given before--deny all that she has said to Monsignor Paterson, and will swear that your sister's death-bed pa.s.sed in total silence, save for the single word 'Auntie,' and under these circ.u.mstances it is perfectly useless to go on; our antagonists will get the money they long for; for money is all they really care for."--"But," I said, "we can bring endless persons and Monsignor Paterson's own deposition to prove what the Abbess's former statements have been."--"No," said Mr. Hawkins, "you cannot bring a witness to prove a witness."--"But," I said, "we can prove every other part of the letter."--"That will do no good," said Mr.

Hawkins; "if you fail in proving a single point, you fail in proving the whole, and the Roman Catholics will get the money; besides, you cannot prove every other part of the letter, for where is the maid, Mary Laffam?--she is not here." And in truth, Mary Laffam (whose evidence was all-important, who was to swear to the screaming at the very mention of Francis' name, who was constantly present during the illness) was mysteriously missing, and no trace of her could then be found. Two days afterwards she was traced, and it was discovered that she had been sent abroad by the Roman Catholic confederates to be out of the way--sent by them to the Augustinian Abbey of Charentan in France.

During the discussion which was now taking place, the utmost excitement prevailed in court. Almost every one stood up. Mr. Hawkins urged--"Are your adopted family prepared to pay what the Roman Catholics claim?"--"Certainly not."--"Then you must submit to a verdict."--"I leave it in your hands." So I wrote on a bit of paper, "Say no more than this. I withdraw anything that may be legally taken as _libellous_ in the letter to Mrs. Montgomery." Then the group opened, and Mr. Hawkins again stood up and said that he was in a position to withdraw the letter--if it contained any libellous statements to apologise for them.

At the same time "his client could not submit to be told that he had either acted maliciously or invented anything: he was absent from England at the time of his sister's death, and had throughout acted entirely upon information he had received from those upon the spot."

"I will have an end of this, gentlemen," exclaimed the judge--"I give a verdict for forty shillings."

"Make it ten guineas, my Lord," shouted the Roman Catholic lawyer, who had previously interrupted Serjeant Parry by saying "We will have money, we will have money." "There shall be an end of this, gentlemen," said the judge; "I give a verdict for forty shillings," and he walked out of court. And so this painful ordeal came to an end. It was not till afterwards that I was aware that the verdict of forty shillings obliged me to pay the costs of both sides--?199 to my lawyer, and ?293 to the Roman Catholic lawyer, which was afterwards reduced by a taxing-master to ?207, 9s. 1d.

As soon as we left the court and returned to the hotel, our solicitor came in, and, before all those of our family who were present, declared how, by my desire, he had repeatedly offered to withdraw the letter to Mrs. Montgomery, but how money was always demanded as its price, and how money was proved throughout to be the only real object of those who brought the action. In looking back, therefore, upon the whole of this terrible affair, I only see three ways in which the trial could have been avoided:--

1. If Miss Stanley had had the courage to go openly to Mrs.

Monteith and Lady Lothian, and say boldly that she, a Roman Catholic, was the cause of my writing the letter to Mrs.

Montgomery; that as to the "report," I acted entirely and exclusively on information which she gave; that at first I had hesitated to do as she wished, but that she had continued to urge it; and that she, a Catholic, had looked over the letter before it was sent, and begged me not to alter a word of it.

2. If my solicitor had acted upon the one piece of advice given by Mr. Phelps, and weeks before the trial had requested Pierina to deliver her "message," we should then have known that the message was not given to her except through the medium of the servants, and therefore that by English law the wording of the letter was indefensible.

3. If my solicitor had been less supine in summoning witnesses--if he had at once subp?naed Mary Laffam and the other maids on our side, and had also summoned my Aunt Fitz-Gerald, who would have been willing and glad to give her evidence, and whose very appearance would have made Francis shrink from allowing the Roman Catholic confederacy to continue the trial.

Mary Stanley and I went early to the Guildford station to wait for the train which was to take us back to London. We had not been long on the platform before all the Roman Catholic party emerged upon it. I went at once to meet and _pa.s.s_ them, thinking it better at once to establish the terms on which we were to remain through life. The Mother Pierina alone lingered behind the rest, and, with streaming eyes and outstretched hands, came towards me. "Oh, I thought it would have been for peace," she said. I could not refuse to take her hand, when Mr.

Monteith, turning round, roughly seized her by the shoulder and led her away, saying, "Reverend Mother, I must insist that you do not speak to that ... _person_." Afterwards, when she was entering the railway carriage after the others, Mrs. Dunlop seized Pierina and pushed her out of the carriage, almost throwing her down upon the platform, and slammed the carriage-door in her face. Admiral Dunlop immediately forced his wife to get out of the carriage and apologise to the Reverend Mother. I did not know till long afterwards the reason of Mrs. Dunlop's violence, which was the persistence with which Pierina throughout that day had dwelt upon the wicked unfairness of having the trial in the absence of Mary Laffam, who was the witness really responsible for all that had been said. On August 19 Mary Stanley wrote to me:--

"Yesterday I saw Sister Pierina. She said how extremely grieved she had been for you. She said the lawyer on the Catholic side read the evidence to all the party at Guildford, and that she then expressed her dissent, saying that it was not in accordance with what Mary Laffam had said to her and others, and that in justice to you, she, Laffam, ought to be present. All through that day (which she said was most dreadful to her) she a.s.serted and rea.s.serted this, and that you were not fairly dealt with, and to me she complained sadly of the un-christian spirit in which the affair had been carried on: Mrs. Dunlop, she said, was _far_ the worst.

"Pierina denies _nothing_. She could only say, when asked about the message, that none was given directly to _her_, and that to her your sister had only said, 'Tell Francis that he has been the cause of my death.' She was forbidden to say to whom the message was given. So far from going over to the other side, she was at war with them the whole day, and told me she did not believe any of that party would ever come near her again; and I met Monsignor Paterson on Sunday, who told me that Mrs. Dunlop had been to him to complain bitterly of her."

Afterwards the feeling of the conspirators, especially of Mrs. Dunlop and Mrs. Montgomery, became so violent against the Mother Pierina (on account of her persisting in the injustice of the trial), that they not only stopped their own subscriptions to her charities, but induced others to do so, and eventually, by the interest of Mr. Monteith with Monsignor Talbot and other Roman authorities, they brought about her recall and persecuted her out of England altogether.

On August 7, Monsignor Paterson wrote a long letter to Mary Stanley, explanatory of his conduct in the affair. It contained the following remarkable pa.s.sage:--

"A day or two after Miss Hare's death, which took me quite by surprise, I went to her house, and there saw Sister Pierina, who told me she had been summoned, and found Miss Hare actually dying; that she seemed very suffering, and had some difficulty in resigning herself to the will of G.o.d. I remember also hearing that she expressed distress at some conduct on the part of Mr. Francis Hare, and I thought that other expressions used implied a suspicion on her part of some kind of _foul play_. Of course, had I taken this _au s?rieux_, it would have made a great impression, but I set it down, after a moment's reflection, as a random (perhaps almost delirious) expression, such as people who are very ill sometimes use with very little meaning at all."

Strange certainly that an eminent Roman Catholic priest should call at his friend's house, hear that she had died suddenly, and that she had said on her death-bed that she died from "foul play," and yet be able so easily to dismiss the subject from his mind!

Soon after the trial I wrote a long account of the whole proceedings to Archbishop Manning. His answer was very kind but very evasive--"Miss Hare's death was most sad ... the trial must have been most painful," he "sympathised deeply," &c., but without giving a direct opinion of any kind.

It was not till some months later that I became acquainted with a secret which convinced me that, though my sister's end was probably hastened by the conduct of her brother Francis, yet poison was the original cause of her death. When we next visited Pisa, Madame Victoire told me how, when my sister was a little girl of six years old at Paris, she and her own little girl, Victoria Ackermann, were sitting on two little stools doing their needlework side by side. Suddenly there was a terrible outcry.

Little Anna Hare had swallowed her thimble. The whole house was in consternation, doctors were summoned in haste, the child was given emetics, was held upside down, everything was done that could be done to bring the thimble back, but it was too late. Then the doctors inquired what the thimble was like, and on seeing the thimble of the little Victoria, who had received one at the same time, were satisfied that it was not dangerous, as the thimble being of walnut-wood, would naturally dissolve with time, and they gave medicines to hasten its dissolution.

But, in the midst of the confusion, came Mrs. Large, the nurse, who confessed with bitter tears that, owing to her folly, the thimble was not what it was imagined to be. She had not liked to see the child of the mistress with the same thimble as the child of the maid, and had given little Anna one with a broad band which looked like gold but was really copper. When the doctors heard this, the accident naturally a.s.sumed a serious aspect, and they redoubled their efforts to bring back the thimble. But everything failed; the wooden thimble dissolved with time, but the copper band remained. Gradually, as Esmeralda grew stronger, the accident was forgotten by all but her mother, Mrs. Large, and Madame Victoire, who observed from time to time, in childish illnesses of unusual violence, symptoms which they alone could recognise, but which were such as would arise through slight injury from poison of verdigris. As my sister grew, the copper ring grew also, attenuated to the minutest thread, but encircling her body. From time to time she was seriously affected by it, but her mother could not bear it to be spoken of, and her repulsion for the subject communicated itself to Esmeralda herself. She was warned to evade a damp climate or the use of vegetables. When she was seized with her violent illness at Dijon, the symptoms were all such as would be caused by poison of verdigris.

She then went to Pisa, where Madame Victoire was alarmed by what she heard, and insisted upon the best advice being procured, and a medical examination. The doctors who saw her, even then spoke to Madame Victoire of her state as very serious, and requiring the most careful watching.

When Esmeralda went to Rome to the canonisation in the summer of 1867, she returned by Pisa. The faithful Madame Victoire then sent for a famous medical professor of the University of Bologna to meet her, and insisted upon her being examined by him. He afterwards told Madame Victoire privately that though, by intense care, Miss Hare might live for many years, her life, in case of accident, hung on a thread, and that it was highly improbable that she would live long, for that the copper ring was beginning to tell very seriously upon her const.i.tution, and that when she died it would probably be suddenly of black sickness, with every appearance of poison--poison of verdigris. And so it was.

One of the princ.i.p.al actors in the scene at Guildford was soon after called to account before a higher tribunal than any that earth can afford. On the 18th of November (1868) I received (at Rome), to my great surprise, a letter from Madame Flora Limosin, of the H?tel de Londres at Pisa (Victoire's youngest daughter), saying that Francis was about to arrive there from Hy?res. He had been sent away from England some time before, having then ?80 in his possession. Whether this sum was obtained by a Roman Catholic subscription, I have never been able to learn, but from this time the Roman Catholic conspirators ceased to help him: he had failed as the instrument for which they required him, and they now flung him aside as useless. His folly at Guildford, in lending himself to their designs, had also alienated the whole of his own family, even to the most distant degrees of relationship. Not knowing where to turn, he could only think of two persons who would receive him in his dest.i.tution. His mother's faithful maid Madame Victoire and her daughter Flora were still living at Pisa, and to them, when he had only ?20 left, he determined to make his way. On landing at Spezia, though even then in a dying state, he would not enter a hotel, because he felt that if he entered it he would never have strength to leave it again, and he sat for hours upon his luggage on the platform of the station till the train started. For the sake of their old companionship in childhood, and of the kindness she had received from my father, Flora Limosin not only received Francis, but also the person to whom he was married, and gave them some quiet rooms opening upon the garden of the H?tel de Londres, where he was nursed by the faithful friends of his infancy.[387] He was attended by Padre Pastacaldi, who administered to him the last offices of the Church, and says that he died penitent, and sent me a message hoping that I forgave him for all that had pa.s.sed at Guildford. He died on the 27th of November, utterly dest.i.tute, and dependent upon the charity of his humble friends. He was buried by them in a corner of the Campo Santo at Pisa, near their own family burial-place, where the letters F. H. in the pavement alone mark the resting-place of Francis George Hare, the idolised son of his mother.[388]

XV

LAST YEARS WITH THE MOTHER

"Nothing but the infinite pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life."--JOHN INGLESANT.

"Never here, for ever there, Where all parting, pain, and care, And death, and time shall disappear-- For ever there, but never here!

The horologe of Eternity Sayeth this incessantly,-- Forever--never!

Never--forever!"

--LONGFELLOW.

"Dic n.o.bis ... Quid vidisti in via?

... Gloriam vidi Resurgentis."

--_From the Paschal Ma.s.s._

"C'est une ?me qui se racconte dans ces volumes: '_Autrefois, aujourd'hui_.' Un ab?me les s?pare, le tombeau."--VICTOR HUGO.

The autumn of 1868 was indeed filled for me with utter misery and "weariness of spirit." If it were not that my dear Mother had gone hand and hand with me through the terrible time of the trial and the weeks which followed, I could scarcely have survived them. To please her, I went away for a time, at the end of August, to our old friend Mrs.

Francis Dawkins near Havant, and to Ripley Castle and Flaxton in Yorkshire; but I had no spirits to enjoy, scarcely to endure these visits.

It added to the complication of troubles that the poor Aunt Eleanor, for whose sake alone I had brought all the trouble upon myself, now began to take some perverted view,--_what_ I have never ascertained. She went to live with her brother George Paul, who had lately returned from America, and for ten years I never saw her to speak to.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOIGNY.[389]]