THE NARRATIVE.
THE NARRATIVE.
There are two roads direct by which the scene I am about to describe can be reached from Boston. One is the steam-car road, passing through Roxbury, and dropping way-passengers at Laurel Hill Station. The other is the horse-car line, that, for some portion of the route, runs parallel to the steam. The third, and more picturesque, is another horse-car line, which passes through Jamaica Plain, and drops the passengers some several hundred yards west, and farther removed from the official terminus of the two other routes. It was by the second of these routes, that, on the 12th day of June, 1865, two children, Isabella and John Joyce, started from their home in Boston, where they were temporarily boarding, to spend a few hours in May’s wood, intending to return, according to the elder one’s promise, in time for her brother to attend his afternoon school. Thus it is established that the sister never intended to go farther than the wood first proposed; and in this we have the first glimmering of the series ofmysterious circumstances in which the wretched affair is enveloped from the beginning to the end.
This girl was not sixteen years old.
The boy was barely eight.
Whatever happened after they took their seats in the car, and who accompanied them, or joined them afterward, is a matter simply of conjecture; and yet, as they sat there, these two young things, who, of all the rest of the passengers that looked upon their fresh, pleasure-anticipating faces, could have dreamed that, in a section so civilized, a community so guarded, a population so abundant, in the marginal outlines of a great city, that ere the sun went down, within a few short hours, indeed, that girl and boy would be lying stiff and stark, pierced,—the one, the girl, by twenty-eight poniard stabs, and the boy by enough to have killed the captains of a full regiment; the girl dead in the hollow of a rock within thirty feet of a public road, the boy less than a quarter of a mile away, in the dense shrubbery, by a tiny stream that flows through the shades of Bussey’s wonderfully beautiful woods!
Now, this wood of Bussey’s—at present in the possession of Mr. Motley, one of the heirs by marriage—is a subject of frequent thought to the writer of this narrative. It was so before it became the witness to the murder of these two children; after that, while of course losing in sentiment and by association some ofits innate and sympathetic loveliness, it ever wore the weird aspect of a mystic realm; but now is added that terrible consciousness of a fright, a terror, pervading all its recesses. The wood lies about six or seven miles southward of the Boston State House, on a county road, and its summits are lofty enough to afford a view of the city and the rattlesnake infested Blue Hills back of the Mattapan, more southwardly yet.
The wood, as you approach down the road from Mr. Motley’s gate, presents the aspect of a hill of pines, dark and massive; but, crossing the fence that keeps it from the highway, you are almost at once in the midst of a mingled growth of birch and beech and willows; beneath these passes the brook, near to whose bank was found, farther up, the body of the boy. Old Mr. Bussey, it would seem, was a man of droll, yet picturesque fancies, mingled with a sturdy sense of the useful; for no sooner are you free of the pasture land, and in among the trees, than you discover traces of his handiwork. The path you are upon is broad and well constructed, leading to a solid bridge of masonry; and well may you pause here to take in the full effect of the scenic entanglement. On your right is a fish-pond, fringed with the swamp willow, and of sufficient capacity to contain fish enough for a council of cardinals during the abstinent days of Lent; and near by a spring of water, so cold that ice is never needed bythose frequent picnic parties that, up to the period of the murders, sought these delicious retiracies for holiday festivals, or love’s deeper and sweeter plans of recreation. 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. If you choose, there is a wild pathway made among the zigzags, and this you can pursue until the summit meets you, with the recompense of a noble prospect, but with your muscles somewhat demoralized. 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. Company in a graveyard, at midnight, destroysin some measure the unpleasant sense of other than human propinquity; and it is the same in a modified form, in this umbrageous condensity. 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. 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; or, rather, in the solving of the many difficult problems that are suggested by special and eccentric occurrences, he does not demand an iron-clad testimony,—a testimony not in accordance with the fact under inquisition. The existence of a thing is to be proved by evidencethat can apply to the nature of its existence. The intention of Byron’s brain cannot be proved by the same process you would take to prove that the ocean over the Banks of Newfoundland is not so deep as in its centre. If we waited for facts in proof of what we cannot directly understand, we should starve mentally, or go mad. Air is invisible, but it exists. It is here; it is yonder. It is more keenly felt by animals whose skins are thin. The armadilla, possibly, doubts its existence, unless he has the gift of seeing it; but the hairless dog of China is no sceptic on the subject of atmospheric changes and attacks. Man, exposed to the blast, feels it more sensibly than the elephant placed in the same current. Theopinionof the armadilla, or of the elephant, has nothing to do with the fact of the air’s existence. The former animal recognizes a tempest, not by what he feels, but what he sees; and if he sees wind, then I give up my illustration, but not my argument. He sees a vision of flying dust, broken branches, prostrate trees. Possibly he draws his deductions from the theory of the sliding faculty of sand,—which phenomenon he has, perhaps, suffered from; and he has seen trees overturned by sand-slides, and, as the tempest beats unfelt upon his adamantine scales, he thinks the sand-power is at work, and would debate all day with any thin-skinned animal who would assert that it was done by a tempest of air. “I never saw it, Inever felt it,” Signor Armadilla would perpetually growl forth; and, so far as he was concerned, the air would be sand, and his neighbor a credulous, half-crazy believer in a thing perfectly intangible. He never could attribute the results of a tempest to any force which is not within the range of his experience. He is where he was, but the oak is where it was not. He stood upon a sound place, the oak upon a slide,—that’s all. There was no hurricane. Thus it is that while a thing may exist, it may not always be apparent, and if apparent, only to a few. Men take views according to the texture of their mental cuticle, mercurial or otherwise, thick or thin; and can decisions based upon such capricious contingencies be accepted as a philosophic solution of a doubt, or a truth? But I shall, farther on in my recital, have to deal more practically with this topic, because I shall be drawn to its revelation by the inevitable force of circumstances and incidents.