Family Column.

Wellington Independent, Volume XVII, Issue 1813, 6 January 1863, Page 4

Family Column.

HORACE SALTOUN [From the Cornhill.^ IN THREE PA.RTS.

Part ll.— De Puofundts.

"No one expects that an engagement should last for ever, Miss Otway ; in the natural order of things, it usually terminatevS in a marriage." She proceeded without taking any notice of this. " I made up mind to put an end entirely to existing relations, which have indeed burdened my conscience most terribly." I hardly knew how to meet this singular line of defense, which seemed to assume that no wrong had been committed, and I asked her in what he bad failed, that solemn promises made to him were to be broken at will. I descanted on his laborious life, his blameless moral character, and his deep and absorbing affection for her; I alluded to the pride he bad in her, and hinted how deep would be the responsibility of those who on frivolous grounds dealt so terrible a blow to a man so affectionate and sensative in disposition. Vainly ; I might as well have talked to the winds.

" Did you ever love him, Miss Otway?" She might justifiably have refused to answer this question : but she replied, with a provoking calm and an apparent sadness — " No, I never did ; though I hoped I should do; and now, doctor, may I in ray turn enquire if he commissioned you to put that question ?" "No, he did not;. he uttered no complaint, still less desired any mediation. For this transgression I am alone responsible." She paused a* little, and played with her bouquet. " I assure you I have a sincere regard for him." I made an impatient gesture of dissent. She went on, unheeding : "It is quite natural he should think hardly of me. I am prepared for. that; but my conscience acquits me", with a temper so impetuous, rash, and masterful, we never could have been happy together. It was foolish cowardice of me to hesitate to tell him so before and so spare all these painful scenes." " Scenes which would never have occurred had you not thought fit to play your part in the farce a little too long. I don't envy you the ease of conscience you profess to have, Miss Otway ; you should have consulted these scruples before you entered into a contract by which you secured yonr right to his love and devotion, his time and talents: you have used them, without sparing their, for three years. Well, you have thrown away a true and loyal heart, and a distinguished position ; for there is that in him which must raise him to the head of his profession." Her eye flickered again, and her attention was at once secured. A silence followed, which she appeared determined not to break. Perhaps silence is the most aggravating form of opposition which women adopt, especially when it is accompanied by a smile ; and she smiled when she saw that I noticed her slight empressment as I spoke of the wordly position of Saltoun. I pursued with some heat : " You have acted very wickedly, if, as you say, you never loved him."

" It would be doing worse to marry him, now that I am more and more convinced I don't," (with a smile of the most perfect heartk -sness,) " and you may be sure I will not continue in wrong-doing, and unnecessarily burden my conscience." She paused a little for a parting blow: " And you may tell him, from me, that he has not improved matters bj allowing you to try to assist him." I essayed to convince her that I was wholly unauthorized — that I exceeded my own intentions. I might as well have remonstrated with a marble statue. The yonng lady left me, angry with her, indignant for Horace, and most heartily repenting, my own meddling. The sage has well said, "Give me any plague but the plague of the heart, and any wiehedness but the wickedness of a woman,"

It is perhaps according to human nature that Horace should have received my account very ill : he flew into a passion with me ; blamed his clumsiness, my officiousness,'his own petulance, and what he was pleased to called ray want of temper and judgment, everything, in short, but her heartless hypocrisy. Indeed I felt pretty sharply that I had done no good, and I made an .inward vow never again, on any inducement to meddle in love matters. It did not add to the comfort of my reflections to hear Horace announce that he intended to meet her at a ball that night, and declare that nothing on earth should dissuade him. Knowing how violent his feelings were, and the serene bloodlessness of Miss Otway's, I imagined there would be a scene, in which Horace would only come off second best; however, he swore a mighty oath that go he would, and he kept his word— most unfortunately. Late in the evening of the second day after the ball, a young man, who had for some years acted as his assistant, came to me in great distress. All those who were in daily intercourse with Horace became warmly attached to him ; and the manner of this poor fellow plainly testified to the affection with which his master had inspired him. Mr Saltoun had, contrary to his usual custom, desired him to sit up until his return from the ball. Horace came hack between one and two in the morning, unlocked his desk, took out a considerable quantity of gold, and then went out, without changing his dress. or saying where he was going: He was a good deal agitated, as it would appear; and from that time nothing had been heard of him. This intelligence disturbed me very much ; it was so unlike his usual habits; and from the fact of his not having changed his dress-coat and merely taking money, I feared that his interview with Miss Otway had urged him to some recklessness. 1 caused inquiries to be set on foot ; but without success ; altogether, there was so much mystery about the whole affair, that I placed it in the bands of the detective police. Three days more passed in suspense, and nothing was ascertained, further than that he had been seen, within two hours of his leaving hiSjOwn residence, with some characters of a worse than suspicious order, and that he then appeared to be much intoxicated. The night following, as I was entering the small house which J occupied when called to town, I was touched on the shoulder by a shabbily-dressed man. "You are on the look oujt, I take it, sir, for Dr | Saltoun " (the poor always call surgeons doctor, and address physicians merely as Mr So-and-so) I. replied eagerly in the affirmative. He said he knew where he was, and that he was safe and cared for; that it would be difficult, but not impossible, to get at him ; but that he would, if I liked, manage it: and then I might, if I had pluck, get him away. I knew my informant well; the name by which he was generally known was "Bound-the-corner-Bob;" he gained his living by " looking after lost articles," to use his own words, and had been more than once " in trouble," as the phrase goes ; his low brow, short cropped head, and that iudefinably suspicious look which cpnstant, apprehension of justice gives, stamped him in legible typeas one of " the danjjerpus classes.", But I had. had opportunities of' Showing bjni kindness, and felt certain that he would do bis best to assist me.

r , I made further .inquiries, and ascertained sufficient itp decide me at once to accompany jtayfial night. It woald be uninteresting to ,to the reader, for it was so CQjmpl6tel# interlarded with thieves' slang, as to be utterly unintelligible to the uninitiated

If my starting on this expedition with a wellknown bad character be considered foolhardy, I would remark that, with the exception, perhaps, of city missionaries, there is no class of men who so readily gain free accessin to disreputable houses and dens of infamy in London as medical ! students. Whether it be that we are a recognized necessity of humanity, or that we are accustomed to give without chaige the benefit of our professional skill, or that we are distinguished, especially when young and on the uphill side of life, by a breadth, bordering on latitudinaiianism, in our views of the failings of humanity, I can hardly say ; certain it is, that hardly any door is closed to the medical student, and the words, " It's only the doctor," gives us the entree into places where policemen are rarely seen, and even then, never alone. I must own, that the wilder the student the greater his chance of a welcome ; while the freedom of admission decreases in inverse proportion with the respectability of the physician. Within the hour I was following Bob ; and we traversed above a mile on foot, through regions of misery, poverty and crime. At that time " Seven Dials" was in the full swing of lawlessnessand disorder. As wepassed through each of the numerous lanes were literally choked with people, moving to and fro with the sort of restless, aimless motion of maggots in a cheese. Women without caps, with disordered hair and ragged gowns shouted in that peculiar, husky, cracked voice which certifies to a hard life and dissolute habits; gas flared, and children swarmed ; " city arabs," ragged, stunted, unwashed, unwholesome, but of a precocious vice. There was a street chanter, singing some doggrel rhymes of the gallows literature class, to which he obtained an audience tolerably attentive. At one gin-palace there was some uproar going on within, and the glare threw out in shadow against the decorated windows figures engaged in active combat ; the women had crowded round, and were actually kneeling on each other's shoulders, or holding their children up in their arms, to have a better view of the fray; the unfortunate little creatures screaming with delight, and reporting progress in language of astonishing vileness, interspersed with a variety of oaths. We passed on, and soon gained some more retired streets, which are, towards midnight, though in the heart of all this seething movement, generally very still. The houses seemed without life; the inhabitants dead or asleep. Two or three roystering fellows broke into a song, but we turned the corner and it died away ; a couple of cabs and wretched-looking horses were standing, vainly hoping for a fare; they looked fit for the knackers, and the men were asleep on their boxes, having the look of fixtures in that deserted thoroughfare. We emerged presently from this to a district nearer to the fashionable part of London, but not a whit more respectable* In a forlorn quarter, branching from one of the many deserted and disreputable narrow streets, was a little court swarming with people. The entrance was almost blocked up by men of a low-lived, sinister aspect, unshorn, unwashed ; the small black clay pipe ever between their lips: Not without difficulty, we made our way through them, and then plunged into an interior darkness. We had no light, as, of course we avoided everything which could attract ob-' serration, so I nearly fell over what I imagined to be a bundle of rags, but which was, in reality, a human being stretched in a dour-way ; an oath and some filthy language, was the return for my awkwardness. We entered a large, low room, which I knew at ouee to be one of those places, that under the pretence of lodging houses, are, in reality, haunts of thieves, and are chiefly frequented l»y receiveis of stolen goods, and abandoned women,f under the nominal superintendence of an old Israelite of the worst description.

At a table were seated, in close confabulation, two sinister-visaged. men — their closely cropped heads betrayed their recent place of residence ; a couple of bareheaded, coarse featured women, their ears adorned with enormous earrings, were plying them with liquor, and the men were already more than three parts intoxicated. A. well to-do seafaring man, very probably the master of a merchant vessel, was standing in parley with a brazen-faced Jewess, who was endeavoring to inreigle him into some wickedness, to judge by her abominable leer. A surlyspoken female rose on our entrance, and seemed about to bar our further progress ; but a few words, unintelligible to me— cant pass-words, no doubt— satisfied her, Another dark, ruf-fianly-looking fellow sprang up, and put some qnestions in the same slang; it was replied to in a similar strain, and be also seemed content.

We passed through an inner passage and commenced climbing a narrow staircase. The air below reeked with the smell of spirits and tobacco ; but as we ascended, the atmosphere had a peculiar miasma about it which my practised organs recognized instantly. "Yes it's very bad," returned the man in answer to an observation from me. "You see we've been down in the fever, near all of us, and that makes it not anywayssweet. Oh, yes, there's a many dead; and sometimes we hprdly know what to do with their bodies till they are put under."

" How did you get the fever ? "

"Well, I do believe it were some furniture which old Zaccy bought cheap ; they said it came from a fever-house ; it was cheap, tho'." We crossed a room devoid of any furnitnre. except a bed, and beneath the counterpane my eye could trace the sharpened outline of a human figure: the death odour proclaimed the rest. Up another round of steep and rotten steps, and a poor girl, one of those known as the unfortunate class, came forward. She was no stranger to me, having been for some months an out-patient in Hospital. She made no difficulty, asked no question, but, placing her j hand on my shoulder, urged me forward, and pointed silently to a mattrass on the floor in a oorner of the room, with a couple of blankets tossed on to it; there, unclothed, senseless, and hopelessly intoxicated, lay, or rather crouched, Horace Saltoun. But oh ! how changed and fallen from his high estate. Yea, many there he that have run out of their wits for women ; many also have 2)erished, have erred, and. sinned for women." .... . I quickly learnt all that was needful to know. For five days he had been in this wretched condition ; and when robbed, stripped, plundered, and utterly helpless, he fell iuto this poor girl's hands, who, finding him abandoued, as being good for nothing more, took charge of him and sent to warn his friends.

" Yes, sir, it's a terrible thing ; but I knew him well when I was at Hospital ; he was always very kind to me. It was of no manner of use trying to get hold of him whil,e he had any money left; they kept him too close for that. But here is his watch, sir,"— she drew it from some folds of her poor, shabby dress—" a friend of mine took it from him early on, and gave it to me, because she knew he had been good to some of us poor girls. He was tearing drunk now most of six days ; but he's quite stupid now : he hasn't eaten anything that I know of." - '

(To be continued.)