Verdict of the jury ‘mad,
my lord’
Trevelyan was left alone at Turin when Mr Glascock
went on to Florence with his fair American friends.
It was imperatively necessary that he should remain
at Turin, though he had no business there of any kind
whatever, and did not know a single person in the city.
And of all towns in Italy Turin has perhaps less of
attraction to offer to the solitary visitor than any
other. It is new and parallelogrammatic as an
American town is very cold in cold weather, very hot
in hot weather, and now that it has been robbed of
its life as a capital is as dull and uninteresting
as though it were German or English. There is
the Armoury, and the river Po, and a good hotel.
But what are these things to a man who is forced to
live alone in a place for four days, or perhaps a
week? Trevelyan was bound to remain at Turin till
he should hear from Bozzle. No one but Bozzle
knew his address; and he could do nothing till Bozzle
should have communicated to him tidings of what was
being done at St. Diddulph’s.
There is perhaps no great social question so imperfectly
understood among us at the present day as that which
refers to the line which divides sanity from insanity.
That this man is sane and that other unfortunately
mad we do know well enough; and we know also that one
man may be subject to various hallucinations—may
fancy himself to be a teapot, or what not—and
yet be in such a condition of mind as to call for
no intervention either on behalf of his friends, or
of the law; while another may be in possession of
intellectual faculties capable of lucid exertion for
the highest purposes, and yet be so mad that bodily
restraint upon him is indispensable. We know that
the sane man is responsible for what he does, and
that the insane man is irresponsible; but we do not
know, we only guess wildly, at the state of mind of
those who now and again act like madmen, though no
court or council of experts has declared them to be
mad. The bias of the public mind is to press
heavily on such men till the law attempts to touch
them, as though they were thoroughly responsible;
and then, when the law interferes, to screen them
as though they were altogether irresponsible.
The same juryman who would find a man mad who has
murdered a young woman, would in private life express
a desire that the same young man should be hung, crucified,
or skinned alive, if he had moodily and without reason
broken faith to the young woman in lieu of killing
her. Now Trevelyan was, in truth, mad on the subject
of his wife’s alleged infidelity. He had
abandoned everything that he valued in the world,
and had made himself wretched in every affair of life,
because he could not submit to acknowledge to himself
the possibility of error on his own part. For
that, in truth, was the condition of his mind.
He had never hitherto believed that she had been false
