A Tragedy in the Tombs by Irenæus

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 23, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 17.

A Tragedy in the Tombs.

By Irenæus

It is a trite but true saying that truth is stranger than fiction. A few hours in the court-rooms of a great city will make revelations more remarkable than the wildest fancies of romance suggest. There is in this city a prison with a court-house called the Tombs, because its architecture is drawn from a mausoleum in the land of Egypt. It is gloomy on the outside, gloomier within. Duty sometimes, curiosity oftener, has led me within its walls.

The sorrows of the lowly and poor, the struggles of the wretched with sin and misery, the wages of vice, and the tragedies of broken hearts and wasted lives are displayed as on a stage every day in the court-rooms. Last week one was brought out having in it elements of great dramatic interest, but the more simply and naturally the story is told, the better will the terrible moral of it be seen.

Some fourteen years ago an Irishman came from his native isle to this city, bringing with him his wife and four daughters, all quite young. He found employment at first and got on comfortably. They must have been a family of more intelligence than many of the poor immigrants who find a refuge in this country when hunger drives them from their own. But when the burden of his family became too heavy for the unprincipled wretch to bear, coward as he was, he deserted them, fled to parts unknown, and they have never heard a word from him since. Then the mother succeeded in getting the children into various asylums, and she went back to Ireland. It is not unusual for Irish parents to impose their children in this way on charity. They get them well cared for in the winter at these homes and take them out in the spring sometimes, or when they are able to earn something. The asylum is allowed a certain sum per week for the children's board, and as this sum is more than the cost, the more they have the more money they make.

Several years went on and these children were growing up without any knowledge of the whereabouts of their mother. When the oldest daughter left the asylum, she managed, by dint of industry, energy, and courage, to get knowledge enough to become a teacher. Then, with a noble spirit, she took a room and gathered into it her sisters, and finding work for them to do, they lived comfortably. There is something very fine in the heroic conduct of this oldest girl. It is strange that two such sneaks as the father and mother could be the parents of such a family of daughters. Now they were all earning more than their daily food, and they sent to Ireland for their mother to come back and set up a home once more.

This was a sad mistake, but it was nature and filial affection. The mother came and became a drunkard. There is the bane of life among the lowly. A mother and a drunkard among these four poor girls struggling to make a home for themselves and her. Of course a drunken mother is a living monster. There is no terror like it in this world of sin and misery. She would have the money the girls earned and spend it for liquor. She went to the school where the oldest daughter was an able and respected teacher, and made a scene that covered the teacher with confusion and shame. This was repeated so often that the noble young woman was obliged to resign her place, driven out of it by the beastly conduct of her own mother. Then want added its terrors to this wretched household. But for the one dreadful vice of the mother, they might have been happy, in their humble way, with industry, health, and peace. Now the furniture had to be sold, one piece after another, which the girls had bought with their hard-earned money. The walls and floor were stripped and the mother drank it all, except what little was spent to keep them from starving. Can there be deeper distress than this?

At last, when all hope had perished, and it had become impossible to bear it any longer, the daughters were compelled to seek the protection of the law against their own mother. They laid the case before one of the justices. The mother was arrested and brought into court in the Tombs. The heart-broken daughters told their sad story of suffering, cruelty, and shame. The mother turned upon them and denounced them as vile women, thus going down one step lower in infamy than we had thought it possible before. Their character was investigated, and it was easily proved by their neighbors that they were excellent young women, worthy of all respect and confidence, whose young lives had been blighted by their own mother. She was sent to prison for six months. At the end of that time, perhaps before, she will come out to renew a course of vice and wretchedness which will bring these daughters into sorrow and suffering unspeakable.

In this sad story I see a specimen of parental meanness and baseness rarely equaled even among the people of which these parents are a type. Can a mother forsake her own child? Here first the father, and then the mother, forsook four daughters, leaving them to the cold charity of the world. The father is probably a drunkard, certainly the mother is, therefore the last drop of parental love is expelled from the heart, and even a mother becomes a wolf, destroying the children she would otherwise cherish and protect. Take out this vice, and here in this humble family were all the elements of comfort and enjoyment. With this vice, the home is the abode of woe too grievous to be borne.

But there is a meaner and a baser person than this wretched woman. When we see and know the power of the passion for strong drink, we can pity while we abhor the mother who robs her children that she may buy the liquor she loves more than she loves the children that drew their life from her bosom. We pity her. But for the man who daily ministers to her dread appetite, and, for the sake of a few cents, makes her a drunken demon to carry hell into her household, for such a man there is no pity in a human breast. For him there is a fearful looking for of judgment! Each piece of silver in his till is coined out of the sorrows of orphans. When he counts his ill-gotten gains he counts the tears and sobs of virtue, hungry and in rags. When he drives his fast horse on the road, every foot-fall tramples on hearts he has crushed. May God have pity on him ere he comes among those the smoke of whose torments ascendeth up forever and ever.

When this drunken mother was sent to prison, the feelings of her daughters broke forth in sobs that made the court-room like a funeral. Even then they would have taken her back, and, hoping against hope, would have made one more vain attempt to save her from herself. But it could not be and ought not to be. And thus ended the tragedy in the Tombs. The mother went to her own place, and the poor daughters went to their ruined, desolate home.

Is there balm in Gilead, no help for such woes? Is human nature so lost to all redeeming influences that tragedies like this must be performed continually in a Christian city? Is there no eye to pity, no arm to save?—Irenæus, in N. Y. Observer.