When she had gone and the old palazzo was quiet and empty, the bewildered girl rose to her feet and tried to steady her shaking limbs sufficiently to write what seemed to be a letter but was in reality a will.
“I leave all that I possess,” so it ran, “to Margaret Pullen, the wife of Colonel Arthur Pullen, the best woman Tony said that he had ever met, and I beg her to accept it in return for the kindness she shewed to me when I went to Heyst, a stranger. Signed, HARRIET PENNELL.”
She put the paper into an envelope and as soon as the morning had dawned she asked her servant Lorenzo to shew her the way to the nearest notary in whose presence she signed the document and directed him to whom it should be sent in case of her own death.
And after another visit to a pharmacien, she returned to the Palazzo and took up her watch again in the now deserted bedchamber.
Her servants brought her refreshments and pressed her to eat without effect. All she desired, she told them, was to be left alone until the sister came for her in the afternoon.
Sister Angelica arrived true to her appointment and went at once to the bedchamber. To her surprise she found Harriet lying on the bed, just where the corpse of Anthony Pennell had lain, and apparently asleep.
“Pauvre enfant!” thought the kind-hearted nun, “grief has exhausted her! I should not have attended to her request, but have watched with her through the night! Eh donc, ma pauvre,” she continued, gently touching the girl on the shoulder, “levez-vous! Je suis ici.”[132]
But there was no awakening on this earth for Harriet Pennell. She had taken a dose of chloral and joined her husband.
When Margaret Pullen received the will which Harriet had left behind her, she found these words with it, scribbled in a very trembling hand upon a scrap of paper.
“Do not think more unkindly of me than you can help. My parents have made me unfit to live. Let me go to a world where the curse of heredity which they laid upon me may be mercifully wiped out.”
THE END
Appendix A - Hysteria
Extract from Silas Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: And How To Make Them (Philadelphia: J B Lippincott & Co, 1877).
A portion of the last class I referred to above, and which I have yet to describe, is one I have hinted at as the despair of the physician. It includes that large group of women, especially, said to have nervous exhaustion, or who are described as having spinal irritation, if that be the prominent symptom. To it I must add cases in which, besides the wasting and anaemia, emotional manifestations predominate, and which are then called hysterical, whether or not they exhibit ovarian or uterine disorders.
Nothing is more common in practice than to see a young woman who falls below the health-standard, loses color and plumpness, is tired all the time, and by has a tender spine, and soon or late enacts the whole varied drama of hysteria. As one or other set of symptoms is prominent she gets the appropriate label, and sometimes she continues to exhibit only the single phase of nervous exhaustion or of spinal irritation. Far more often she runs the gauntlet of nerve-doctors, gynaecologists, plaster-jackets, braces, water-treatment, and all the fantastic variety of other cures.
It will be worth while to linger here a little and more sharply delineate the classes of cases I have just named.
I see every week—almost every day—women who when asked what is the matter reply, “Oh, I have nervous exhaustion.” When further questioned, they answer that everything tires them. Now, it is vain to speak of all of these cases as hysterical, or, as Paget has done, as mimetic. It is quite sure that in the graver examples exercise quickens the pulse curiously, the tire shows in the face, or sometimes diarrhoea or nausea follows exertion, and though while under excitement or in the presence of some dominant motive they can do a good deal, the exhaustion which ensues is in proportion to the exercise used.
I have rarely seen such a case which was not more or less lacking in color and which had not lost flesh; the exceptions being those trouble-some cases of fat anaemic people which I shall by and by speak of more fully.
Perhaps a full sketch of one of these cases will be better than any list of symptoms: A woman, most often between twenty and thirty, undergoes a season of trial or encounters some prolonged strain. She undertakes the hard task of nursing a relative, and goes through this severe duty with the addition of emotional excitement, swayed by hopes and fears, and forgetful of self and of what every one needs in the way of air and food and change when attempting this most trying task; or possibly it is mere physical strain, such as teaching. In another set of cases an illness is the cause, and she never rallies entirely, or else some local uterine trouble starts the mischief, and although this is cured the doctor wonders that his patient does not get fat and ruddy again.
But no matter how it comes about, the woman grows pale and thin, eats little, or if she eats does not profit by it. Everything wearies her,—to sew, to write, to read, to walk,—and by and by the sofa or the bed is her only comfort. Every effort is paid for dearly, and she describes herself as aching and sore, as sleeping ill, and as needing constant stimulus and endless tonics. Then comes the mischievous role of bromides, opium, chloral, and brandy. If the case did not begin with uterine troubles they soon appear, and are usually treated in vain if the general means employed to build up the bodily health fail, as in many of these cases they do fail. The same remark applies to the dyspepsias and constipation which further annoy the patient and embarrass the treatment. If such a person is emotional she does not fail to become more so, and even the firmest women lose self-control at last under incessant feebleness. Nor is this less true of men, and I have many a time seen soldiers who had ridden boldly with Sheridan or fought gallantly with Grant become, under the influence of painful nerve-wounds, as irritable and hysterically emotional as the veriest girl.
If no rescue comes, the fate of women thus disordered is at last the bed. They acquire tender spines, and furnish the most lamentable examples of all the strange phenomena of hysteria.
The moral degradation which such cases undergo is pitiable. I have heard a good deal of the disciplinary usefulness of sickness, and this may apply to brief, and what I might call wholesome, maladies. I have seen a few people who were ennobled by long sickness, but far more often the result is to cultivate self-love and selfishness and to take away by slow degrees the healthy mastery which every human being should retain over her own emotions and wants.
There is one fatal addition to the weight which tends to destroy women who suffer in the way I have described. It is the self-sacrificing love and over-careful sympathy of a mother, a sister, or some other devoted relative. Nothing is more curious, nothing more sad and pitiful, than these partnerships between the sick and selfish and the sound and over-loving. By slow but sure degrees the healthy life is absorbed by the sick life, in a manner more or less injurious to both, until, sometimes too late for remedy, the growth of the evil is seen by others. Usually the person withdrawn from wholesome duties to minister to the caprices of hysterical sensitiveness is the person of a household who feels most for the invalid, and who for this very reason suffers the most. The patient has pain, a tender spine, for example; she is urged to give it rest. She cannot read; the self-constituted nurse reads to her. At last light hurts her eyes; the mother remains shut up with her all day in a darkened room. A draught of air is supposed to do harm, and the doors and windows are closed, and the ingenuity of kindness is taxed to imagine new sources of like trouble, until at last the window-cracks are stuffed with cotton, the chimney stopped, and even the keyhole guarded. It is easy to see where this all leads to,—the nurse falls ill, and a new victim is found. I have seen a hysterical, anaemic girl kill in this way three generations of nurses. If you tell the patient she is basely selfish she is probably amazed, and wonders at your cruelty. To cure such a case you must morally alter as well as physically amend, and nothing less will answer. The first step needful is to break up the companionship, and to substitute the firm kindness of a well-trained
hired nurse. Another form of evil to be encountered in these cases is less easy to deal with. Such an invalid has by unhappy chance to live with some near relative whose temperament is also nervous and who is impatient or irritable. Two such people produce endless mischief for one another. In other examples there is a strange incompatibility which it is difficult to define. The two people who, owing to their relationship, depend the one on the other, are for some reason made causelessly unhappy by their several peculiarities. Life-long annoyance results, and for them there is no divorce possible.
In a smaller number of cases, which have less tendency to emotional disturbances, the phenomena are more simple. You have to deal with a woman who has lost flesh and grown colorless, but has no hysterical tendencies. She is merely a person hopelessly below the standard of health and subject to a host of aches and pains, without notable organic disease. Why such people should sometimes be so hard to cure I cannot say. But the sad fact remains. Iron, acids, travel, water-cures have for a certain proportion of them no value, or little value, and they remain for years feeble and forever tired. For them, as for the whole class, the pleasures of life are limited by this perpetual weariness and by the asthenopia which they rarely escape, and which, by preventing them from reading, leaves them free to study day after day their accumulating aches and distresses.
Medical opinion must, of course, vary as to the causes which give rise to the familiar cases I have so briefly sketched. In fact they vary endlessly; but I imagine that few physicians placed face to face with such cases would not feel sure that if they could give the patient a liberal gain in fat and in blood they would be certain to need very little else, and that the troubles of stomach, bowels, and uterus would speedily vanish. Such has certainly been the result of my own very ample experience. If I succeed in first altering the moral atmosphere which has been to the patient like the very breathing of evil, and if I can add largely to the weight and fill the vessels with red blood, I am usually sure of giving relief. If I fail it is because I fail in these very points, or else because I have overlooked or undervalued some serious organic tissue-change.
If I did not know that I had been happy in thus aiding numberless cases in which others had failed, I should not have ventured to write these pages; and if I have succeeded it must be because the methods pursued have been other than those now commonly in use.
In the following chapters I shall treat of the means which I have employed, and shall not hesitate to give such minute details as shall enable others to profit by my failures and successes. In describing the remedies used, and the mode of using them in combination, I shall relate a sufficient number of cases to illustrate both the happier results and the causes of occasional failure.
The treatment I am about to describe consists in seclusion, certain forms of diet, rest in bed, massage (or manipulation), and electricity; and I desire to insist anew on the fact that it is the use of these means together that is wanted. The necessities of my subject will of course oblige me to treat of each of them in a separate chapter. …
It is rare to find any of the class of patients I have described so free from the influence of their habitual surroundings as to make it easy to treat them in their own homes. It is needful to disentangle them from the meshes of old habits and to remove them from the contact with those who have been the willing slaves of their caprices. I have often made the effort to treat them in their own homes and to isolate them there, but I have rarely done so without promising myself that I would not again complicate my treatment by any such embarrassments. Once separate the patient from the moral and physical surroundings which have become part of her life of sickness, and you will have made a change which will be in itself beneficial, and will enormously aid in the treatment which is to follow.
Of course this step is not essential in such cases as are merely anaemic and feeble and thin, owing to distinct causes, like the exhaustion of overwork and of long dyspepsia; but I am now speaking chiefly of the large and troublesome class of thin-blooded emotional women, for whom a state of weak health has become a long and almost, I might say, a cherished habit. For them there is often no success possible until we have broken up the whole daily drama of the sick-room, with its little selfish-nesses and its craving for sympathy and indulgence. Nor should we hesitate to insist upon this change, for not only shall we then act in the true interests of the patient, but we shall also confer on those near to her an inestimable benefit. A hysterical girl is, as Wendell Holmes has said in his decisive phrase, a vampire who sucks the blood of the healthy people about her; and I may add that pretty surely where there is one hysterical girl there will be soon or late two sick women. (pp. 29-35)
Extracts from Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind. A Study of its Distempers, Deformities and Disorders (London: Macmillan & Co, 1895).
Nor have the acquisitions of moral culture been yet so ingrained in human nature as to be fixed and stable instincts of the kind; for they are gained with difficulty and are lost with ease. If the child of civilized parents is carried off by savages and reared by them, it grows up a savage without the least memory of the lost conquests of culture; nay, if such a child be carried off by a she-wolf which suckles and rears it with her cubs, the creature, when discovered, goes on all-fours and has the tastes, feelings and habits of the young wolves. So precarious is the human, so powerful is still the animal, in mankind. History shows by many lurid examples, when the checks that curb and tame the brute within the man are removed and the passions set free, how the same horrible outbreaks of lust, rapine, cruelty and bloodshed invariably and uniformly follow; that the only difference between the savage and the civilized being then is that the latter uses his superior reason to devise and perpetrate more specialized refinements of savagery. A very simple reflection is instructive in this connection: that although man has now been in the habit of walking upright for unnumbered ages his body has not yet acquired perfect accommodation to the erect position, but suffers a variety of painful ills, such as varicose veins and haemorrhoids, in consequence of his God-like form. What wonder then that he betrays in so many ways the later and less stable acquisitions of his God-like faculties of mind? The child born with a mental organisation destitute of the fine nervous tracery which should subserve moral development is an example of a process of dehumanisation—that is, of the decomposition of the social nature of man, the rapid unmaking or stripping off of what has been slowly made or put on through the ages, the easy dissolution of a tedious process of evolution. …
I have previously described the features of the revolutionary evolution of mind which goes along with the physiological changes of puberty. Being a travail of transition during which new sensations, new emotions, new ideas spilling up, it is inevitably attended with some disturbance of the mental equilibrium, and sometimes, where that is unstable because of an hereditary strain of weakness, with a complete overthrow of it. The new feelings and impulses have to find and make their adjustments within and without, and until they have done that they occasion much subjective unrest of a vague yearning kind—blind longings and cravings, undefined aspirations, tremulous pantings for the unknown, large and vague enthusiasms, accompanied by a dreamy sadness, a brooding want, a not altogether unpleasing melancholy. The thrill of the infinite in the individual has somehow to make its accommodations to the finite. So it comes to pass that out of the dim formless yearnings there spring up ideal forms in the domain of love or religion: either some terrestrial mortal whom the transcendent feeling invests with the glories of the ideal or gloriously invents outright, or a celestial object of devotion on which its expansive aspirations are fixed and spent. A mixed religious and erotic colour is indeed a striking feature of the insanity befalling at this period of life. Another notable feature, especially marked when the disorder occurs early in pubescence, and then imparting a characteristic complexion to it, is the mixture and contrast of the childish feelings and ideas of ending childhood with the pert self-sufficiency and self-assertive conc
eit of bud-ding adolescence; a manner which, lacking the restraints wrought into character by riper experience, is apt to be rude, saucy, boorish. …
Females are on the whole more liable to the insanity of this period than males. In them the changes of pubescence are completed in a shorter time, and the reproductive functions exhibit their larger effects on mind by a larger development of the affective life in proportion to the intellect; while in the periodical function of menstruation there is furthermore not only a special cause of recurrent disturbances of the mental tone, dis-turbances bordering closely on derangement in some neurotic persons, but its irregularities and suppressions may become the direct occasions of positive disorder. Women again for the most part labour under the prejudice of having a narrow range of activity in life compared with the wider range open to men; they lack and miss the vicarious outlets of feeling and force in an equal variety of aims and pursuits; and they are debarred by social usages and physiological consequences from the illicit indulgences which in men are openly condemned, secretly practised, and tacitly condoned. Moreover, however much woman may exalt her rights and claim equality of pursuits and powers with men, she cannot, so long us she is susceptible to love and glad to bear its burdens, fail to find her main end in man and the family, not in herself. …
The insanity of this period takes either the excited form of mania or the depressed form of melancholia. Beginning in the former case with a short period of mental excitement marked by much self-conceit, loss of all diffidence or reserve of demeanour, pert impertinence of speech, rude extravagances of conduct, whims and caprices, wanton acts of folly or mischief, which are done the more and with greater glee the more distress or remonstrance they cause, as if out of a wilful defiance of the proprieties and a delight in outraging them—it rises quickly to an acuter and wilder mania. Then there is much excitement of a noisy and tumultuous kind, with violent outbursts of laughter, loud singing, startling yells and cries, and ceaseless chattering; sudden starts, leaps, bounds and runs, and impulsive acts of apparently wanton mischief or destruction; paroxysms of aimless screaming, writhings, struttings, pushings, strikings in resistance to control, all having a show of wilfulness yet without definite method or aim. There is no depth of meaning in the emotion and conduct; on the contrary, it is laughter without mirth, fury without passion, purpose-like violence without true purpose. Consciousness is not so extinct as the behaviour at the worst might seem to denote. The patient will recognize a person, realize the situation in a flash of perception, understand and partially answer a question, yield for the moment to a display of firmness, perhaps thrust out the tongue when asked, and then relapse instantly into voluble and incoherent talk, turbulent behaviour and wild antics, all which are evidently a vast relief and delight to her. Sexual excitement shows itself frequently in the general complexion of the symptoms and especially in wanton words and gestures, indecent attitudes, loose exposures, even lascivious acts and attempts to strip naked; sometimes the excitement is interrupted by ecstatic or quasi-cataleptic states of speechless trance or stupor, in which with apparent insensibility to impressions there are rigid contractions of the muscles of the whole body or violent shudderings and contortions of them, all having the air of being wilfully set going and kept up; and sometimes the spasmodic motions of the ecstasy precisely fore-stall the movements of sexual congress. Self-abuse may be a repulsive feature of the mania, occasionally there is a veritable frenzy of it; with the increase of the mental degeneration the idealism of love is degraded into mere sensual lust, the imaginative joys of erotomania into the sensual fury of nymphomania. Mixed up with the erotic features there is sometimes a strain of religious babble, and the intact virgin chatters incoherently of religion, and of babies which she imagines herself to have had or to be going to have.
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