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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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I NEVER saw such a change in a man in my life! When we last met, Jack—well, I must not give his real name, considering what I am going to relate, so I'll call him Jack Pallant—was, as he had ever been since I knew him, one of the lightest-hearted, cheeriest fellows in the world, full of fun, and up to everything, and as gentle and tender as a woman, with the courage of a lion. And now, what did I find him? Even though but three months had elapsed, he had become a grave, dejected, saddened man; in a word, hardly recognisable, either mentally or physically. I was shocked, and of course he saw that I was. He came to see me, indeed, the moment he heard I was in town, that I might learn from his own mouth what had happened, instead of at second-hand. Jack had always been more or less a spoiled boy—only sons are always more or less spoiled—and having lost his mother when quite a child, it was not wonderful that his poor old dad made much of him. But he had taken the spoiling kindly, and, beyond making him perhaps a little idle and thoughtless, it had done him no harm. There was no vice in the fellow; he spent more money than he should, but many young soldiers do that, without coming to much grief in the long-run; and his father, a soldier before him, regarded the failing leniently, paid his bills, and looked pleasant. Beyond adding that he was a rather short, dapper little fellow, I need not say much more about him; I have only to try and put into coherent shape the strange and tragical business which had so fearfully altered him. His account of it was so disconnected, and so faltering at times, through the emotion which the recital cost him, that I make no attempt to reproduce his story in his own words. It all happened in a railway carriage; and though we have had enough and to spare of tales of murders, robberies, strange meetings, ghosts and lunatics, which have had a railway carriage as their place of action, I venture to believe that there is still something novel in the circumstances which led to my friend's sad transformation.
He was coming to town one autumn evening for a few days' leave from Gunnersholt, where he was quartered. I can see him as plainly as if I had been there, springing into the first carriage that offered room, without regard to who was in it; for he was the least fastidious of men, without the slightest particle of "haw-haw" pride and nonsense, or that stand-offishness of manner, too usual with men in his position; ready to make himself happy wherever he was, or in whatever company. Fond of talking to everybody, liking to draw them out, as he said, and studying character with the full conviction that there was something to be learned from everybody; chaffing and laughing, or sympathising and helping according to the occasion. Why, I have seen him helping a mother or nurse with half-a-dozen children in charge, as if he had been a Paterfamilias, dandling the baby, or chucking it under the chin, or squeaking at it, tickling the little boys under the ribs until they went into fits, or making the little girls laugh with his comical stories and humorous ways. Quite at variance, indeed, was the private life of Jack Pallant with that of the ordinary British soldier; his brother-officers were oftentimes aghast at his proceedings, until they came to know and like him. Therefore, I say, I picture him taking the first seat that offered, and ready to talk to any one in the carriage who would talk to him.
But it so happened, it appears, on this occasion that he got into an empty carriage; at least he thought so, for it was twilight, and he did not observe for the first moment the figure of a woman, seated in a farther corner, dressed in dark clothes, and thickly veiled.
The sudden discovery that he was not alone rather startled him for a moment, and it may be, as he said, that the evening before having been a guest-night at mess, his nerves were not quite up to their usual tone. He was not the lad, however, to be long in such a situation without making some remark to his fellow-traveller, though in this case an unusual hesitation to do so came over him, owing to her mysterious appearance and extreme stillness. The between-lights of the carriage-lamp and the evening sky prevented him from discerning details; but there she sat, perfectly rigid, and with not a vestige of her face visible, through the thick black veil.
"Ahem! ahem!" he said at last, shifting one seat nearer to her and nearly opposite; "I hope I have not intruded on you; I thought the carriage was empty. I may be disturbing you, I fear." He would say anything, in a random sort of way, to break the ice, as he called it.
No answer. A long pause. "Very singular," he thought; and he moved to a seat exactly opposite to the figure, making another commonplace observation. No response, or any movement.
"Asleep, I suppose," he said to himself; and he sat, quietly watching her, whilst the train rattled on for a mile or two. A station was reached, and a stoppage made, with the usual accompaniments of screech, and whistling, and slamming of doors, but without producing any change in the posture of the occupant of the opposite corner. The train again moved on. "Can't be asleep," he muttered.
"What's the matter with her?" The window was close shut; he let it down, with a tremendous clatter and bang, remarking, that "he hoped as the evening was fine, the weather warm, and the carriage close" (for he declared to me there was a peculiar odour hanging about which struck him from the first), "she would not object to a little air?"
Still, no reply. Then he said: "He feared she was not well; would she like him to pull the bell for the guard, and have the train stopped again?" But nothing he could say or do elicited any sign of life from her.
Jack now became seriously uncomfortable and alarmed on her account. He thought she could not be asleep, but had fainted. Suddenly, it crossed his mind that she was dead! Night had now closed in, but as the last tinge of twilight faded from the sky, the carriage-lamp gained its full power, and revealed every object more plainly than hitherto.
Jack leaned towards the motionless form. A long black veil, falling from a close-fitting hat-like bonnet, enveloped nearly the whole upper part of her figure; indeed, on close inspection, it hardly looked like an ordinary veil, but more like a large thin black silk handkerchief. Her dress was of common black stuff, much worn and frayed, from amidst the folds of which appeared the ends of a piece of rope that must have been fastened round her waist; and one hand, encased in an old ill-fitting black glove, lay placidly on her lap.
Full of uncomfortable sensations, Jack was about to lift the veil, when, for the first time, the figure moved; its other hand stole slowly from beneath the folds of the dress, and the veil was gradually lifted, and thrown up over the head.
Involuntarily my friend shrank back into the corner of his seat, for a face was revealed to him which no one could have looked upon without a sense of awe. It was that of a woman somewhat past middle age, thin, haggard, and pale to a degree which only death could parallel. The features, finely chiselled and proportioned, showed that at one time there must have been supreme beauty, whilst, though the iron-gray hair looked a little dishevelled and unkempt, the glance of the eye was steady, calm, and determined.
In this glance lay, chiefly, the awe-inspiring expression of the face, for, in addition to the penetrating look, there was a persistency in it, and at the same time a fascination, quite terrible. It fixed itself upon Jack from the first moment that eye met eye, and for several minutes not a word was spoken on either side. Presently, however, he tried to pull himself together, and to assume his usual light-hearted manner, which had thus for a minute been so strangely and unusually disturbed, and he said briskly: "I beg your pardon; I was afraid you were ill."
She slightly bent her head, but spoke not a word, nor withdrew her glance.
He felt more and more that it was costing him an effort to be himself. Her slow, stealthy, albeit lady-like demeanour added greatly to the effect already produced, and a curious sensation was gradually creeping over him, that—impossible as it might seem—that face was not strange to him. Little as he, with his temperament, was given to speculation or introspection, he found himself striving to look back for some event or circumstance in his life which might give him a clue. Had he ever dreamed of such a face, or had he seen it in childhood? He was puzzled, affected, quite put out. And still the deep penetrating eyes were fixed on his, piercing as it were into his very soul. And the hands! what were they doing? Taking off the gloves as with a set, deliberate purpose; and the long white, thin, almost claw-like fingers worked strangely and nervously, slowly closing and opening upon the palm, as if preparing to grasp something.
Again, he strove to throw off the unpleasant, unusual sensation which had crept over him. "I can't stand this," he thought; "I was never so uncomfortable in my life! I must do something, or say something to put a stop to this, to make her take her eyes off me!"
He moved abruptly to the farther corner of the carriage, and to the same side on which the woman sat.
"I'll try and dodge her in that way," he said to himself; "she shall not sit and glare at me in this fashion!"
But she too immediately shifted her place, and, rising to her full height, which was very great, went over to the seat exactly opposite to him, never for one single second dropping her eyes from his. He looked out of window with a vague notion of getting out of the carriage; when suddenly, passing a little station which he recognised, but at which the train did not stop, an idea struck him—an idea after his own heart—a comic idea! He availed himself of it on the instant, and assuming an ease which doubtless sat ill upon him, and which he was far from feeling, he pointed with his thumb back towards the station they had just passed, as he said mysteriously in a hollow voice: "Do you know that place?"
She seemed to answer in the affirmative by a slight inclination of the head as before.
"Ah! you do. Good! Longmoor," he went on; "then I don't mind telling you a secret." He paused. ("I'll frighten her," he thought) "Criminal lunatics," he said aloud; "I am one of them. I have just escaped from there!"
He leaned forward as if to impress her with his words; she also bent forward until her lips almost touched his ear, as she hissed into it: "So have I!"
With what had already gone before, this put the finishing touch to Jack's uneasiness of mind. It was not, as he said, the mere presence of the woman, or the revelation which his joke had elicited, which scared him, though the circumstance in itself might be unpleasant enough.
"I should have faced it right away from the first, as any man would have done, had it not been for the remarkable influence her face and look had upon me; that unaccountable feeling that she was no stranger to me, it was, that unnerved, and even appalled me."
No sooner had she uttered the words, "So have I," than Jack sprang to the cord communicating with the guard's van, for he felt their truth, and saw in them a key to the whole mystery. But ere his hand had reached the cord, she had seized him round the waist with one arm as with the grip of a vice, and at the same instant he felt one of those terrible hands at his throat.
Every effort to release himself was fruitless; her strength seemed superhuman, and was as far beyond his as was her stature. Her face glowered close down upon his now, still with the same fell expression. "The only thing I could have done," went on Jack, in describing the scene to me—and just here, he shall speak for himself: "the only means by which I might perhaps have made her relax her hold would have been by aiming one or two tremendous blows with my right fist (which was at liberty) at her face. Had it been a man's, there would have been no hesitation; had it been indeed that of an ordinary woman, at such a pass I should not have hesitated to strike her, to stun her, if I could, by any means; but that face—that face, that I seemed to know so well, yet so mysteriously, I could not raise my hand against it, and, as my arm swung up with the first impulse, to deal her a blow, it fell helpless by my side. Vain were my efforts to get her hand away from my throat; there was a terrible swaying to and fro for a minute or two, I felt the grip of the long fingers tightening, and myself choking. Suddenly we fell, the whole carriage seemed to be falling—there was a fearful jerk or two, a strange upheaving of the floor, a tremendous rattle and crash—I appeared to be thrown headlong to some great distance, and—all was darkness!"
THE termination of that deadly struggle was brought about in a manner as marvellous and unlooked-for as could well have been imagined.
Some fifty souls, say, were travelling in that train, all, save one, in apparent security. Jack's life alone was in danger, when, lo! by one of those marvellous coincidences which do happen at times in the supreme moments of existence, the rescue came, but at the cost of many a life, which, but just before, would have seemed worth treble the purchase of Jack's.
At the very instant that his might have depended upon another tightening grip or two from the hand of a maniac, a frightful catastrophe occurred to the train. The tire of an engine-wheel broke, and half-a-dozen carriages were hurled down a steep embankment. The scene that succeeded is, unhappily, of too common an occurrence to need more than a word of reference here. Seven passengers were killed outright; double that number slightly or badly hurt; the remainder escaping, as by a miracle, with nothing worse than a severe shaking.
My friend was amongst the shaken. He had been thrown clear of the debris, on to a soft grassy spot, half-bank, half-hedge; emphatically, his life was saved!
But what followed it was that which caused the suffering, that wrought the terrible change in Jack.
In the darkness of that soft autumn night, he strove, foremost amongst those who had been spared, to render such help as was possible to the less fortunate. When the official assistance came, and fires were set blazing to give light, almost his first care was to try and seek out his dangerous fellow-traveller. In the confusion, nobody was prepared, of course, to listen to Jack's account of her, even had he been prepared then to give it. She was not, evidently, moving about amongst the crowd; he assured himself of that; but supposing her, like himself, to have escaped injury (and he concluded that this was likely), might she not, with the stealth and cunning Incidental to her malady, be hiding, and by thus farther eluding detection, become, with her homicidal mania, as dangerous to the community at large, as some fierce, wild animal would be? The thought made him shudder; he must lose no time in assuring himself of her fate.
As soon as an approach to order could be evolved out of that awful chaos, he had convinced himself that she was not amongst the injured. Then he turned to the dead. His eye fell upon several mutilated and motionless forms, which had been laid in an ominous row at the foot of one part of the embankment; hers was not amongst them; he could find no trace of her.
At length, as a sickly dawn was beginning to make the search easier, he endeavoured to discover the spot where the carriage he had occupied had fallen, and to retrace his steps (quite to the rear of the train, by the way) to the place where he found himself lying after the catastrophe. By this time he had made known briefly to some officials that a woman was missing, who had been in the carriage with him, and one or two of them followed him in his quest. Presently he realised pretty well where he had been thrown; he all but identified the spot. Then he scrambled through the hedge, and there, on the opposite side, on the sloping bank of a ditch, he beheld, lying quite still, her dark unmistakable form. He ran forward, and bending over her, and looking down upon the marble, upturned face, saw at a glance that there was nothing dangerous about her now; those terrible eyes were closed for ever! Except for a slight wound on one temple, whence a little blood had trickled, and the distorted but now rigidly closed hand, which had been so lately at his throat, she looked as calm and uninjured as if she were merely sleeping, whilst death had restored for a brief period much of that beauty, the traces of which had struck him when her veil was first lifted.
One of the surgeons here came hurrying up, in answer to a summons. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed; "here she is, then, at last! Why, she must have been in the train. How on earth did she manage it?"
"Who is she?" inquired Jack earnestly, with a strange return of the old inexplicable sensation. "Who is she? You appear to know her. Pray, tell me."
"Oh, one of our inmates: she got away yesterday morning; no one knows how," was the answer.
"You are from Longmoor, then. How long has she been there? What is her name?"
"Oh, she has been there upwards of twenty years, I believe; long before my time."
"And her name?"
"Upon my word, at this moment, I can hardly," went on the doctor, mechanically passing his fingers over one of the pulseless wrists before him, and with a calm hesitation which contrasted strongly with Jack's earnest impetuous manner— "I can hardly remember. I think she was committed for the murder of her own little girl. It was a sad case, I know.—Ah her name; I have it," went on the doctor suddenly: "her name was Pallant—Rachel Pallant."
Jack sprang from the kneeling posture in which he was, as if he had been shot. Why, that was his own dead mother's name! But pshaw! what of that? Well, it was rather a startling coincidence; that was all! Ay, but was it all? Indeed, no.
The inquest led to a revelation. That inquiry fully explained what had been the nature of the influence which the weird pale face and strange presence had had upon my friend.
The strong but subtle link which no time or absence can quite sunder, existing between mother and son, had made itself felt the instant those two sat face to face, for the unhappy woman was indeed none other than Jack’s own mother!
He had never been told; in fact, it had been carefully kept from him: why run the risk of clouding for life that bright and happy temperament? He was only four years old when the dreadful business happened. Hence he had scarcely known a mother’s care; she was lost to him, to the world, as completely as if she had died. Nay, death would have been a mercy by comparison, and it was generally assumed that she was dead; only a few very intimate friends knew the truth. The poor lady's mind had given way suddenly after the birth of a child, who did not live. Within a week, the homicidal mania possessed her: by the merest chance she had been prevented from committing some frightful outrage upon her little boy, my poor friend Jack; and restraint not having been put upon her in time (for her malady had hardly been suspected, so unlooked-for was its appearance), she consummated her deadly propensity upon her eldest child, a girl, fifteen years of age: killed her, in a word, as she lay asleep.
And here, after a lapse of twenty years, was the climax and end of the tragedy, as dreadful as anything that had gone before. The order for release, when it came, brought with it as much suffering (to all but one) as had the order for captivity. No wonder that Jack was an altered man: I have never seen a smile on his face since—though I trust that time, with its healing influence, may at least soften the blow.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.