Henry Johnson Brent

“ She was not too young to die, but too young to be slaughtered. The boy’s face is that of a child; but a bright and reflective little fellow, with a large development of brain, and, by the extreme innocence of his expression, casting a deeper shadow of crime upon the wretch who took away his life. Taking the photograph as a test, he seems to be about eight years old and no more, and with such a face that it must have been a sad thing for those who found him, to look upon with the mask of murder stamped upon it. ”

“ I was doubtless in a sublimated condition of rapport, as the mediumistic philosophers term it; a human instrument of a thousand strings, that the feeblest ghost might play upon with ever so withered a hand. But none came to inform or frighten me, and not a sound other than the low clicking of the wood insects broke the magic ring of silence that closed in with such profundity of pathos this terrible situation. ”

“ I was sitting on the eastward porch,—which I said before gave a lookout toward the wood,—and had been sending up my quota of cloud to mingle with the fraternity of vapor around the setting sun (my pipe, my laboratory) , when, as the shades grew purplish down in the ravine by the brook, I heard repeated shouts. When an ordinary stillness is violently broken, there follows a shock to the nervous system, repeated upon it by sympathy with the divinity of silence whose reign has been disturbed. Sometimes terror commences at once her frantic flight over all the barriers of reason ”

“ I dedicate this book to that philosophy which can argue without anger, can have a disbelief without sustaining it by insolence; which can pause on the brink of a chasm, and, because there happens to be no bridge by which it can cross over, will not proclaim to all the world that no bridge can be built; to the philosophy which sees as much beauty in a doubt as in a solution, and has not ventured, or mayhap will never venture, to affix a limit to human thought, or define the prerogatives of our Lord and Creator. ”

“ Did those children take this route?
Along the ridge, a broad walk leads to the spot where the wounded-to-death body of the unhappy girl was found. But, if you think otherwise, in your humor of unsettled choice, you can turn to your right, and, winding around the base of the hill, through dwarf pines at first, and heavy timber afterward, stroll on until you reach the scene of the primal tragedy. Did they go by this way? The wildness, the solemnity, and total seclusion of the place, even in the broad daylight, are oppressive to the imagination, if you happen to be alone. ”

“ To peach on me would have been to implicate himself, and, as drunkenness is morally a worse crime than the smoking of a cigar, he would have been the first to have suffered decapitation. It was my self-possession alone that turned one of the most reliable ghost incidents into a tale of beastly absurdity. If I was so near seeing a ghost’s legs on that night, which turned out to be no ghost’s legs at all, why might there not be some chance of my visitor on the brow of the hill to-night turning out to be some vagrant more wildly drunk than the drunken college-phantom? ”

“ By all but hilarious picnic parties, the solitude and seriousness of a wood is admitted; and this wood is one of the most unique I have ever visited. But, since then, it is no simple congregation of trees and rocks and mysterious paths,—no longer a sylvan asylum of perfect repose, inviting to reverie, to pleasure, or the interviews of love, sweetened by the security that shadows of leaves throw upon the blushing hieroglyphic of the cheek, or the deeper and softer and better understood language of the eyes. ”

“ Had his apostles and disciples disbelieved in his appearance after death, and hooted at the story told of his ghost wandering toward them, where would be the Christian church to-day, and where the theory of the resurrection? We disbelieve now, and scoff at what the Saviour did, and his apostles saw, unless he was an impostor, and they liars. Do we in our churches, when we read the biblical narrative of the innumerable appearances, sneer at the book that tells us its contents are the result of divine inspiration, and every word is true? ”

“ A gloom is here established forever. It is a witness of that most terrible of tragedies to which our human condition is liable. The knife of the murderer has gleamed here,—the cry of the victim been uttered. It is haunted! Haunted by what? Who can tell? By ghosts, or the idea of ghosts? It makes no difference which. In such cases, where logic is shattered over a catastrophe, imagination lifts up the fallen form of contracted reason, and ministers to its inability. Man does not always demand facts ”

“ Are our direct senses to settle all points of doubt and difficulty? Or, let a man enter, then, who had never seen a rose, and you were to [Pg 119] tell him of the great fragrance of the flower of which bards have sung and Scriptures made similes,—would you not scoff him if he said such things were not possible to a plant like that, that looked like painted paper? Then how can you say anything about it who have never seen a ghost? To your senses it may be as yet hidden by a barrier stronger than glass, but yet as transparent to others. ”

“ Society is not the same; the ordinary laws of justice, of health, of life itself, are not the same. There are a thousand more appliances now, than there were, by which human life can be destroyed or preserved,—gunpowder, steam, machinery, with their countless adjuncts of power, on one side, and chemistry, with ether, and other discoveries, on the other. And as science becomes the assistant to the conveniences of mankind, in the same ratio it becomes his slayer. ”

“ I myself would not willingly try that visit over again, not that I dread anything of harm from such an act, but because I have been there once before and have had enough. But if I never see that strange visitor again, I will see the murderer. Of that I am convinced. I have firm reliance in law when it is honestly employed to detect crime or protect the wronged. I have faith in that subtle sympathy, which connects us with the dead. ”

“ They have, it is to be supposed, thrown off the passions of the flesh, with the flesh,—the passion of anger, the passion of mischief, and all the low and base adjunctives that adhere to us in our state of usual visibility. They are not monsters, but symbols, or aerial realities of our former friends. Even the ghost of Robespierre, of Nero, or Jeffrey, would be harmless, bad as they were when encompassed in their fibrous shells of flesh. Ghosts, as a general rule of logic, cannot be as bad as those of earth with whom they have their interviews. ”

“ Who so arrogant in his wisdom as to be able to rise to the proof that it may not be so? The atrocity of self-conceit is more terrible than the atrocity of ignorance; the one is an active crime, the other a passive submission. The impossible means the possible. It is a favorite dogma with the utilitarian doctors, that nothing is impossible to the genius of man. Is there anything impossible to our Creator, other than the impossibility of making a mistake? ”

“ I have given one theory, without in the least asserting it to be the correct one; but it is as good a theory as the public can get hold of outside of that mysterious room in the City Hall wherein the tall chief of police weaves his webs.
There being nothing else but murder in the girl’s death, we must seek for some motive that could have driven that man to so terrible a necessity. What other than the one I have suggested? Was it monomania for human blood? That could have been gratified among a denser population than he would be likely to find in Bussey’s wood. ”

“ In the first place, I am no sectarian; least of all am I a spiritualist; and if I am anything of a creed man,—which the Lord grant I am!—I am of a church that is founded on the system of marvels, as indeed, for that matter, are all churches, Christian or Pagan. The Saviour of mankind, let me with all reverence say, is admitted to have been duplex in character,—mortal for our sympathies, divine for our worship. ”

“ And when I placed myself exactly on the blood-stained spot, I looked around with the certainty of being confronted by the apparition whose existence I was there to determine. Now, thought I, is the opportunity,—this the place for a revelation. What other man will ever come again with so foolhardy a brain and give the witnesses or the victim a chance so appropriate and so melodramatic? If any one does venture upon the trial, to a scene so fresh with gory associations, from my soul I pity him, and [Pg 83] would blame; but this species of curiosity is not generally diffused throughout society. ”

“ If truth be stranger than fiction, then the marvels of the veritable make larger drafts upon our credulity than the fabrications of the imaginist, and there can be no harm done if we prepare ourselves for revelations that in time [Pg 108] may be made to us, and whose mysticism, enlightened by the practical test of law, will stand forever in the dry tomes of jurisprudence, subduing the impertinence of our dogmatical self-conceit, and establishing the fact that truth is a principle that can traverse the air, as well as walk arm in arm with us in our daily habits. This is the incident. ”

“ Crossing this lower bridge, and passing over a road with velvety grass borders, you turn to your left, and if you have the time from sandwiches and other condiments, or are not too absorbed in emotions that beat marches to the field of matrimony, or much elaboration of flirtation, you will see the steep ascent, bearded with huge pines, and covered with abutting rocks, looking like the base of a minor incident of Alpine precipice. ”

“ Nothing is lost, nothing changes, though we call reproduction change, and flatter ourselves that we have spoken a great philosophy. Why is the world full of ghost-stories outside of the Scriptures? Because ghost-stories have been veritable facts,—these lay ghost-stories travelling alongside of the clerical ghost-stories of the Inspired Book, and substantiating to the common appreciation of all mankind the veritableness of the Bible. ”

“ What could have been the motive to get her to secluded, distant Bussey? I answer, self-defence. Self-defence against two children? Yes. The girl was an intelligent, observant girl, and she may have been cognizant of some crime, the revelation of which would have brought ruin and punishment upon the perpetrator; or the perpetrator might, in his consciousness of the possibility of her having discovered him, come to the resolution to dispose forever of any chance of her being a witness against him. ”

“ I felt as a drowning man might feel who, admitting the fact that the water has got the master of him, lets that primary incident take care of itself, and looks only to some object by whose aid he may relieve himself from the desperate catastrophe. ”

“ Canute, the king, tried an experiment of mastery with the tide. What other despot of school theory will make the same effort with the tidings of the brain of man, hoping for better success than the Danish fool? If there be such, so sure as the first known madman of the Hamlet race was driven from the beech, will the other be overwhelmed by the resistless force of that great wave of intelligence which has already grappled with the lightning, and taught it the babel language by which man expresses his endless wants. ”

“ The hour, the circumstances, and the locality, all contributed to inspire a greater horror of the act; and yet, up to this moment, no man’s name, of high or low, bears a blemish of continued suspicion. Justice seems to rest, after the excitement of the instant search,—a search that, I have every reason to know, was intricate and thorough; but, at the same time, it is well to know that the intelligent Chief of the police department has only seemed to pause. His eyes have never been entirely withdrawn from the contemplation of the subject ”

“ As naught of the material can suffer annihilation, so the soul, being indestructible, permeates the air we breathe as do those revived plants of perfume that last fall we might have fancied dead and beyond all chance of life again. ”

“ Put out your light and let the room grow dark, and pause and think, and then perhaps, despite the adamantive philosophy of your unbelief, you may recognize the sentiments I have; or on some still and luminous night, moonless, drive out to that old wood and by yourself, even now, with such great washings of rains and cleansing of snows and storms of wind, go to the rock where the girl was found and see how your nerves will quiver, or how your heart will throb ”

“ They are like the history of the past sublimated by the eloquence of immutable truth, and are sanctified by a sleep that has eternal life within its closed lids. They have, too, a sympathy in retort with us. ”

“ He may pretend to pray when others pray, to hide his wicked past in the garb of piety; he may mutter his wrath on all of us who seek him for his punishment; he may fly now the advancing steps of justice: but, as he flies, the feet of justice may become inactive, while it sends over every railroad and steamboat line of travel, by every wire that vibrates to all the remotest places of retreat, the command of his arrest. Wherever he is now, and wherever he may be then, he is doomed ”

“ The murderer may have perhaps, ere this, caught glimpses, from his abode of gloom in another world, of those two spirits whose bodies he hacked so butcherly. If that be so, the Chief will have naught to do; but if he be alive, wandering a desolate path through a desolate world, it may be that justice will not have waited with an energetic patience in vain. ”