Chapter 4

This influence, which we may be permitted by good Calvinists to call diabolical, was, as a consequence, not only in its origin, but also in its medium, altogether extraneous to our couple. For so far as regards Mrs. Jenny Dodds, she was, as much as a good wife could be, free from any great defects of conduct; and as for the tinsmith himself, he had hitherto lived so sober and douce a life, that we cannot avoid the notion, that if he had not been subject to "aiblins a great temptation," he would not have become the victim of the arch-enemy. Thus much we say of the dispositions of the two parties; and were it not that certain peculiarities belonged to Jenny, which, as reappearing in an after-part of our story, it is necessary to know, we would not have gone further into mere character--an element which has little to do generally with legends, except in so far as it either produces the incidents, or may be developed through them. The first of these peculiarities was a settled conviction that she had as good a right to rule Tammas Dodds, as being her property, as if she had drunk of the waters of St. Kevin. Nor was this conviction merely natural to her; for she could lay her finger on that particular part of Sacred Writ which is the foundation of the generally-received maxim, "One may do what one likes with one's own." No doubt, she knew another passage in the same volume with a very different meaning; but then Mrs. Dodds did not _wish_ to remember that, or to obey it when she did remember it; and we are to consider, without going back to that crazy school of which a certain Aristippus was the dominie, that wishing or not wishing has a considerable influence upon the aspects of moral truth, if it does not exercise over them a kind of legerdemain of which we are unconscious, whereby it changes one of these aspects into another, even when these are respectively to each other as white is to black. This "claim of right" does not generally look peaceful. No more it should; for it is clearly enough against nature; and one seldom kicks at her without getting sore toes. True enough, there do appear cases where it seems to work pretty well; but when they are inquired into, it is generally found either that the husband is a simpleton, submitting by mere inanity, or a man who has resisted to the uttermost, and is at last crumpled up by pure "Caudlish" iteration and perseverance. How Tammas took it may yet appear.

Proceeding with the peculiarities: another of these was, that Mrs. Dodds, like her of Auchtermuchty, or Mrs. Grumlie, carried domesticity to devotion, scarcely anything in the world having any interest to her soul save what was contained in the house--from Tammas, the chief article of furniture, down, through the mahogany table, to the porridge-pot; clouting, mending, darning, cleaning, scouring, washing, scraping, wringing, drying, roasting, boiling, stewing, being all of them done with such duty, love, and intensity of purpose, that they were veritable sacrifices to the _lares_. This was doubtless a virtue; and as doubtless it was a vice, insomuch as, if we believe another old Greek pedagogue of the name of Aristotle, "all virtues are medial vices, and all vices extreme virtues." How Tammas viewed this question may also appear. But we may proceed to state, that Mrs. Janet Dodds was not content with doing all those things with such severity of love or duty. She was always telling herself what she intended to do, either at the moment or afterwards. "This pan needs to be scoured." "Thae stockings maun be darned." "This sark is as black as the lum, and maun be plotted." "The floor needs scrubbing." "Tammas's coat is crying, 'A steek in time saves nine,' and by my faith it says true;" and so on. Nor did it signify much whether Thomas or any other person was in the house at the time--the words were not intended for anybody but herself; and to herself she persisted in telling them with a stedfastness which only the ears of a whitesmith could tolerate; even with the consideration that he was not, as so many are, deaved with scandal--a delectation which Janet despised, if she did not care as little for what was going on domestically within the house on the top of the same stair, as she did for the in-door affairs of Japan or Tobolsk. We may mention, also, that she persevered in reading the same chapter of the Bible, and in singing the same psalm, every Sunday morning. In addition to these characteristics, Janet made it a point never to change the form or colour of her dress; so that if all the women in Edinburgh had been of her taste and mode of thinking, all the colours by which they are diversified and made interesting would have been reduced to the dead level of hodden-grey; the occupation of the imp Fashion would have been gone; nay, the angels, for fear of offending mortals, would have eschewed the nymph Iris, from whom the poets say they steal tints, and dipt their wings in a grey cloud before appearing in the presence of the douce daughters of men.

With all these imperfections--and how many husbands would term some of them perfections!--the married life of Thomas and Janet Dodds might have gone on for another five years, and five to that, if it had not been that Thomas, in a weary hour, cast a glance with a scarlet ray in it on a certain Mary Blyth, who lived in the Grassmarket--a woman of whom our legend says no more than that she was a widow, besides being fair to the eye, and pleasant to the ear. We could wish that we had it not to say; but as truth is more valuable than gold, yea, refined gold, we are under the necessity of admitting that that red ray betokened love, if an affection of that kind could be called by a name so hallowed by the benedictions of poets and the songs of angels. You must take it in your own way, and with your own construction; but however that may be, we must all mourn for the fearful capabilities within us, and the not less awful potentialities in the powers without--the one hidden from us up to the moment when the others appear, and all wrestling with the enemy prevented by what is often nothing less than a fatal charm. From that moment, Thomas Dodds was changed after the manner of action of moral poisons; for we are to remember that while the physical kill, the other only transmute, and the transmutation _may be_ from any good below grace to any evil above the devil.

This change in the mind of the husband included his manner of viewing those peculiarities in the mental constitution of Janet to which we have alluded. Her desire to rule him was now rebellion; her devotion to "hussyskep" was nothing better than mercenary grubbing; her adhesion to her hodden-grey was vulgar affectation; and as to her monologues, they were evidence of insanity. Such changes in reference to other objects happen to every one of us every day in the year, only we don't look at and examine them; nor, if we did, could we reconcile them to any theory of the mind--all that we can say being, that if we love a certain object, we hate any other which comes between us and our gratification; and thus, just as Mr. Thomas Dodds loved Mrs. Mary Blyth, so in an equal ratio he hated his good helpmate Jenny. And then began that other wonderful process called reconciliation, whereby the wish gradually overcomes scruples through the cunning mean of falsifying their aspects. Whereunto, again, the new mistress contributed in the adroit way of all such wretches--instilling into his ear the moral poison which deadened the apperception of these scruples at the same time that it brought out the advantages of disregarding them. The result of all which was, that Jenny's husband, of whom she had made a slave, for his own good and benefit, as she thought, and not without reason, arrived, by small degrees, and by relays of new motives, one after another, at the conclusion of actually removing her from this big world, and of course also from that little one to her so dear, even that of her household empire.

A resolution this, which, terrible and revolting as it may appear to those who are happily beyond the influence of "the wish," was far more easily formed than executed; for Nature--although improvident herself of her children, swallowing them up in thousands by earthquakes, tearing them by machinery, and drowning them in the sea by shiploads--is very careful to defend one of them against another. Every scheme the husband could think of was surrounded with difficulties, and one by one was laid aside, till he came to that of precipitating his faithful Jenny, as if by accident, into a deep pool in the North Loch, that sheet of water which contained as many secrets in its bosom as that more romantic one in Italy, not far removed from a certain pious nunnery. Even here there was the difficulty of getting Jenny out at night, and down Cranstoun's Close, and to west of the foot thereof, where the said deep pool was, for no other ostensible purpose in the world than to see the moon shedding her beams on the surface of the water--an object not half so beautiful to her as the clear tin pan made by her own Tammas, and in which she made her porridge every morning. But the adage about the will and the way is of such wondrous universality, that one successful effort seems as nothing in the diversity of man's inventions; and so it turned out to be comparatively easy to get Janet out one evening for the reason that her husband did not feel very well, and would like his supper the better for a walk along the edge of the loch, in which, if it was her pleasure, she would not refuse to accompany him. So pleasant a way of putting the thing harmonized with Janet's love of rule, and she agreed upon the condition she made with herself, by means of the eternal soliloquy, that she would put on the stew to be progressing towards unctuousness and tenderness before they went. Was that to be Janet's last act of her darling hussyskep? It would not be consistent with our art were we to tell you; but this much is certain, that Janet Dodds went down Cranstoun's Close along with her beloved Tammas, that shortly after she was plunged by him into the said deep hole of the loch, and cruelly left there to sink or swim, while he hastened back to tell his new love, Mrs. Blyth, how desperately he had done her bidding. But sometimes running away has a bad look; and it happened that as Thomas was hurrying up the dark close, he met a neighbour brother of the craft, who cried to him, "What, ho! Tammas Dodds; whaur frae and whaur tae, man?" To which, seeing how the act of running away would look in the Justiciary Court, he replied with wonderful invention for the moment, that Janet had fallen into the deep pool of the loch, and that though he had endeavoured to get her out, he had failed, by reason of his not being able to swim, and that he was running to get some one to help to save her, whereupon he entreated his brother craftsman to go with him to the spot, and help him to rescue his beloved wife, if she weren't yet dead. So away they went, in a great hurry, but to no purpose; for when they came to the said pool, no vestige of a creature being therein they could see, except some air-bubbles reflecting the moonbeams, and containing, no doubt, the living breath of the drowned woman.

Nor when the terrible news was spread through the city, and a boat and drags were made to do their uttermost, under the most willing hands, could the body be found. It was known that the bank there was pretty steep in declivity, and the presumption was, that the body had rolled down into the middle of the loch, where, in consequence of the muddiness of the waters, it would be difficult to find it. The efforts were continued next morning, and day by day, for a week, with no better success, till at last it was resolved to wait for "the bursting of the gall-bladder," when, no doubt, Mrs. Janet Dodds's body would rise and swim on the top of the waters. An event this which did not occur till about three weeks had passed; at the end of which time a crowd of people appeared at Mr. Dodds's door, bearing a corpse in a white sheet. It was received by the disconsolate Thomas with becoming resignation, and laid on the bed, even the marriage-bed, realizing that strange meeting of two ends which equalizes pain and pleasure, and reduces the product to _nil_. Nor were many hours allowed to pass when, decayed and defaced as it was, it was consigned to a coffin without Mr. Dodds being able to bring his resolution to the sticking point of trying to recognise in the confused mass of muscle and bone, forming what was once a face, the lineaments of her who had been once his pride, and now, by his own act, had become his shame and condemnation in the sight of Heaven. Next day she was consigned to the tomb, in so solemn a manner, that if man were not man, one would have had a difficulty in recognising in that gentle hand that held the head-cord, and dropped it so softly on the coffin, the same member which drove the innocent victim into the deep waters.

There is a continuous progress in all things; a fact which we know only after we get hold of the clue. And so, when Mrs. Mary Blyth appeared as Mrs. Mary Dodds, in room of the domesticated Jenny, it was in perfect accordance with the law of cause and effect. No doubt they did their best to be happy, as all creatures do, even the devil's children, only in a wrong shaft; but they had made that fearful miscalculation, which is the wages of sin, when they counted upon conscience as a pimp to their pleasures, in place of a king's-evidence against them, that king being the Lord of heaven and earth. And so it turned out in the course of several years, that, as their love lost its fervour, their respective monitors acquired greater power in pleading the cause of her who was dead, and convincing them, against their will (for the all-powerful wish has no virtue here), that they had done a cruel thing, for which they were amenable to an avenging guardian of the everlasting element of good in nature's dualism. Yet, strange enough, each of the two kept his and her own secret. Their hearts burned, even as the fire which consumes the wicked, under the smother of a forced silence--itself a torment and an agony; yea, neither of the two would mention the name of Jenny Dodds for the entire world. And there was more than a mutual fear that one should know what the other thought. Each was under a process of exculpation and inculpation--a mutual blaming of each other in their hearts, without ever yet a word said to indicate their thoughts. It was the quarrel of devils, who make the lesser crime a foil to show the greater, and call it a virtue for the reason that they would rather be the counterfeits of good than the base metal of evil; yet with no advantage, for hypocrisy is only the glow which conceals the worm in its retreat within it. The plea of the wife was, that she was courted by the man, and that although she might have wished Jenny out of the way, and hinted as much, she never meant actual murder; while his, again, was the old Barnwell charge, that his better nature had been corrupted by the woman, and that he did it at her suggestion, and under the influence of her siren power. They thus got gradually into that state of feeling by which the runaway convicts from a penal settlement were actuated, when, toiling away through endless brakes and swamps where neither meat nor drink could be procured, they were so maddened by hunger, that each, with a concealed knife under his sleeve, watched his neighbour for an opportunity to strike; nor could one dare to fall behind, without the suspicion being raised in the minds of his companions, that he was to execute his purpose when they were off their guard. So like, in other respects too; for these men, afraid to speak their thoughts of each other, journeyed on in deep silence, and each was ready to immolate his friend at the altar of selfishness, changed into a bloodthirsty Dagon by the fiends Hunger and Thirst.

The years were now to be counted as seven since Janet Dodds was plunged into the deep pool of the North Loch, and the state of mind of the married criminals, which we have tried to describe, had been growing and growing, for two of these years, as if it threatened to get stronger the older they grew, and the nearer the period of judgment. One morning when they were in bed--for even yet, while they concealed their thoughts from each other, and the name of Jenny Dodds was a condemned word in their vocabulary, even as the sacred name among the Romans, they had evinced no spoken enmity to each other--they heard a tirl at the door. The hour was early, and the douce genius of the grey dawn was deliberating with herself whether it was time to give place to her advancing sister, the morning. Mrs. Mary Dodds rose to answer the knock, and Thomas listened with natural curiosity to know who the early visitor was, and what was wanted. He heard a suppressed scream of fear from his wife, and the next moment she came rushing into the room; yet the never a word she uttered, and her lips were so white and dry that you might have supposed that her silence was the result of organic inability. Nor even when she got into bed again, and tried to hide her head with the bed-clothes, did her terror diminish, or her lips become more obedient to the feeling within; so that Thomas knew not what to think, except it was that she had seen a ghost--not an unnatural supposition at a time when occult causes and spiritual appearances were as undoubted as the phenomena of the electric telegraph are in our day. But he was not destined to be left many minutes more in ignorance of the cause of Mrs. Mary Dodds's terror, for, upon listening, he heard some one come into the kitchen, and bolt the door on the inside--so much for his ears; then he turned his eyes to the kitchen, into which he could, as well as the light of the grey dawn would permit, see from where he lay; and what did he see?

"How comes it? whence this mimic shape? In look and lineament so like our kind. You might accost the spectral thing, and say, 'Good e'en t'ye.'"

No other than the figure of Mrs. Janet Dodds herself. Yes, there she was in her old grey dress, busy taking off that plaid which Thomas knew so well, and hanging the same upon the peg, where she had hung it so often for five long years. Thomas was now as completely deprived of the power of speech as she who lay, equally criminal as himself, alongside of him; but able at least to look, or rather, unable to shut their eyes, they watched the doings of the strange morning visitor. They saw that she was moving about as if she were intent upon domestic work; and, by-and-by, there she was busy with coals and sticks brought from their respective places, putting on the fire, which she lighted with the indispensable spunk applied to the spark in the tinder-box. Next she undertook the sweeping of the floor, saying to herself--and they heard the words--"It looks as if it hadna been swept for seven years." Next she washed the dishes, which had been left on the table, indulging in the appropriate monologue implying the necessity of the work. Thereafter it appeared as if she was dissatisfied with the progress of the fire, for she was presently engaged in using the bellows, every blast of which was heard by the quaking couple in bed, and between the blasts the words came, "Ower late for Tammas's breakfast." So the blowing continued, till it was apparent enough, from the reflection of the flame on the wall, that she was succeeding in her efforts. Then, having made herself sure of the fire, she went to the proper place for the porridge goblet, took the same and put a sufficient quantity of water therein, placed it on the fire, and began to blow again with the same assiduity as before, with still interjected sentences expressive of her confidence that she would overcome the obstinacy of the coals. And overcome it she did, as appeared from the entire lighting up of the kitchen. Was ever Border Brownie so industrious! Some time now elapsed, as if she were sitting with due patience till the water should boil. Thereafter she rose, and they saw her cross the kitchen to the lobby, where the meal was kept, then return with a bowl containing what she no doubt considered a sufficient quantity. The stirring utensil called a "theedle" had also got into its proper place, and by-and-by they heard the sound of the same as it beat upon the bottom and sides, guided by an experienced hand, and, every now and then, the sweltering and totling of the pot. This process was now interrupted by the getting of the grey basin into which the porridge behoved to be poured; and poured it was, the process being followed by the sound of "the clauting o' the laggan," so familiar to Scotch ears. "Now it's ready for him," said the figure, as it moved across the kitchen again, to get the spoon and the bowl of milk, both of which they saw her place beside the basin.

All things being thus completed according to the intention of the industrious worker, a period of silence intervened, as if she had been taking a rest in the chair which stood by the fire. A most ominous interlude, for every moment the couple in bed expected that she would enter the bedroom, were it for nothing else than to "intimate breakfast;" an intimation which, if one could have judged by their erect hair and the sweat that stood in big drops on their brows, they were by no means prepared for. They were not to be subjected to this fearful trial, for the figure (so we must persist in calling it) was seen again to cross the kitchen, take down the plaid, and adjust it over the head according to the manner of the times. They then heard her draw the bolt, open the door, and shut the same again after her as she departed. She was gone.

Mr. Thomas Dodds and his wife now began to be able to breathe more freely. The hair resumed its flexibility, and the sweat disappeared; but, strange as it may seem, they never exchanged a word with each other as to who the visitor was, nor as to the morning's work she had so industriously and silently (with the exception of her monologues) executed. Too certain in their convictions as to the identity, whether in spirit or body, of the figure with that of her they had so cruelly put out of the way, they seemed to think it needless to question each other; and, independently of this, the old terror of the conscience was sufficient to seal their lips now, as it had done for a period before. Each of them supposed that the visitor was sent for the special purpose of some particular avengement of the crime upon the other; the appearance in so peaceful a way, in the meantime, being merely a premonition to show them that their consciences were not working in vain; and if Thomas was the greater sinner, which he no doubt suspected, in spite of himself, he might place against that conviction the fact that the inscrutable visitor had shown him the kindness at least of preparing his breakfast, and entirely overlooking the morning requirements of his spouse. Under these thoughts they rose and repaired with faltering step and fearful eyes to the kitchen. There everything was in the order they had anticipated from what they had seen and heard. Each looked with a shudder at the basin of porridge as if it had been invested with some terrible charm--nay, might it not have been poisoned?--a thought which rushed instantaneously into the head of Thomas, and entirely put to flight the prior hypothesis that he had been favoured by this special gift of cookery. The basin was accordingly laid aside by hands that trembled to touch it, and fear was a sufficient breakfast for both of them on that most eventful morning.