Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II.Various
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II.
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
I visited Jane Eccles the next day in Newgate. She was a well-grown
young woman of about two or three-and-twenty--not exactly pretty,
perhaps, but very well-looking. Her brown hair was plainly worn, without
a cap, and the expression of her face was, I thought, one of sweetness
and humility, contradicted in some degree by rather harsh lines about
the mouth, denoting strong will and purpose. As a proof of the existence
of this last characteristic, I may here mention that when her first
overweening confidence had yielded to doubt, she, although dotingly-fond
of her nephew, at this time about eight years of age, firmly refused to
see him, "in order," she once said to me, and the thought brought a
deadly pallor to her face--"in order that, should the worst befall, her
memory might not be involuntarily connected in his mind with images of
dungeons, and disgrace, and shame." Jane Eccles had received what is
called in the country "a good schooling," and the books Mrs. Davies had
lent her she had eagerly perused. She was, therefore, to a certain
extent, a cultivated person; and her speech and manners were mild,
gentle, and, so to speak, religious. I generally found, when I visited
her, a Bible or prayer-book in her hand. This, however, from my
experience, comparatively slight though it was, did not much impress me
in her favor--devotional sentiment, so easily, for a brief time,
assumed, being, in nine such cases out of ten, a hypocritical deceit.
Still she, upon the whole, made a decidedly favorable impression on me,
and I no longer so much wondered at the bigotry of unbelief manifested
by Mrs. Davies in behalf of her apparently amiable and grateful
protégée.
But beyond the moral doubt thus suggested of the prisoner's guilt, my
interviews with her utterly failed to extract any thing from her in
rebutment of the charge upon which she was about to be arraigned. At
first she persisted in asserting that the prosecution was based upon
manifest error; that the impounded notes, instead of being forged, were
genuine Bank-of-England paper. It was some time before I succeeded in
convincing her that this hope, to which she so eagerly, desperately
clung, was a fallacious one. I did so at last; and either, thought I, as
I marked her varying color and faltering voice, "either you are a
consummate actress, or else the victim of some frightful delusion or
conspiracy."
"I will see you, if you please, to-morrow," she said, looking up from
the chair upon which, with her head bowed and her face covered with her
hands, she had been seated for several minutes in silence. "My thoughts
are confused now, but to-morrow I shall be more composed; better able to
decide if--to talk, I mean, of this unhappy business."
I thought it better to comply without remonstrance, and at once took my
leave.
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