The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1878-10-01 00:00:00

THE SALAAM MYATERY :" A
SUGGESTION.

IA correspondent forwards th;--fo-11-owinit, letter, for the
, publication of which he has received parrs& 1114 OD-
Editor, World.)
" This so-called mystery wee never any mystery to
me, to whom cruel and bitter experience gave the only
too certain clue. I had tried, for obvious reasons, to
put away from my thoughts the ugly episode, so
loathsome in its every phase; and had, an a measure,
succeeded, am well as almost having succeeded in living
down the shadow on my own life, of which it was an
Intensified echo, when now there comes Mn. Bravo's
death, in all the tell-tale wretchedness of it, to re-
touch the al/ but dead chord, and bring back upon me
the p ignant memory of a misery that many • time
seemed to me too hard to be endured -of • misery that
in agenda's was a parallel of the misery to escape
from which Cherie. Bravo soaped also from life.
We have known each other for some time, yet I think
, I may be sure you never gulead at the existence of
such • ghatly skeleton in the domestic life of my
Past. Nor would I now reveal that long-shrouded
horror, but that I wish to prove to you, at least
inferentially, that although the woman just dead in
effect slew her husband, yet she was no murderess,
and never had a tit tight of murder in her poor,
besotted, undisciplined mind. I have read somewhere
the comment, heartless because of its pitiless innuendo,
that Mrs Bravo died without leaving behind her any
c tofession. Not in the muse which this ruthless
stabber of the dead would have us accept has the poor
lost woman left any confession; such confession,
nevertheless, as she had to make stands avowed in all
its degraded nakedness in the published report of the
inquest held on her drink-sodden body. She put her
life in evidence; and to me, with the special experience
I have alluded to, that evidence is absolutely con-
elusive.
"I fang, if the secrets of all households stood
revealed, there would be found many men besides
myself who, under the same maddening goad, have
only just, with a hand-to-hand wrestle with the devil,
withstood the temptation to which Charles Bravo
sw•cumbecl. As I read the wretched weary story of
this woman's passion for drink, every pitiful
Incident of cunning recklessness, every trait of self-
abandonment, every evanescent gleam of abortive
reformation, penetrate me with a cruel familiarity that
tears the scar from the wound I had thought cicatrised.
My own domestic experience parallels with startling
accuracy every phase of bet self-Immolation before this
Moloch of brandy. Poor Florence Bravo had • worse
start on the road of life than had her parallel who was
ones 03 dear to me; but there were convincing proofs
in the evidence given on the trial that she was affec-
tionate and warm-hearted, shat she knew the charm
of • clean and simple life, and that but for dipsomania
she might this day have, humanly speaking, been a
respected and self-respecting wife. Ah, me I I have
trodden with soreheart and weary, yet eager, footstep
the bank of the swift river, on the bosom of which
such another fated craft was inexorably gliding to
destruction 'now clutching eagerly, sometimes with •
gleam of almost sure hops, ever doomed to turn to
sickening despair, to arrest its progress; now watching
it, and trying to pray, as it floated, with scarcely
onward motion, over a broad almost currentless
shallow ; and now writhing in torture, and my praying
turned into cursing, as the ridden rapid caught it
again too surely, and carried it inexorably down the
facifis descrans.
- • •

"Do not I know every stick and stone, every step
and halting-plane, on this horrible rga doforo,al As I
read the story of this inquest, there came back on me
kindred memories of slowly-growing reluctant realisa-
tion of the horror—of heart-appeals to that better
nature which the enthralling mania had not quite
obliterated, of tearful pledges of reformation wherein
drink hysteria had most to do with the tears, of
miserable subterfuges of secretiveness (" the brsuailt-
bottle placed in a cupboard behind deceased's dresses )
of long periods of besotted bedriddennees, of spasms of
all but deadly sicknese, of slow prostrate penitent
gropings backward from the half-open portals, of the
last sad act of the tragedy, when the road to the pre-
mature gray, was marked by naked demands for the
p 'Leon that had killed the mind and the heart and the
decency, and was now slaying the body. With this
kindred experience of mine. I require no effort to put
myself in Charles Bravo's place. Over and over again
I have been there, with this reservation, that in his
wife's admitted unchaatity he had an added burden
which was spared me; rind further, that I am a man
of tougher fibre and firmer mental muscle than this
131,,,, vzsilonateincipwililitt.hceoc.k.o7T.c.rttus
the
ma
easier
prey to the temptation with which I have oftentimes
wrestled--oncoesefully indeed, but with a veritable
bloody sweat. Rage has mwhiened me; despair has
prostrated me to abjectness; love fighting with dis-
gust, with shame, with the bore .r of broken promisee,
anti wretched irresponsible deception, has driven me
to such wildness of self-miatrust, that I have fled, lest
I should do murder on myself or on the other. I
swear that there is no such aggravation that can come
from the lips of • woman whose faculties are warped
by secret drinkiug, and whom you love, I am not
venom." enough to wish my worst enemy an ex-
perience of the horrible tositare to which such a
eitnation bodies a man as to • perpetual bed of hell.
And that Charles Bravo cat free hia bonds by taking
his own life. I am as absolutely convinced, in virtue
of the burning retrospect of my own narrow escape
from such • fate, am if I had seen him, with my own
eyes, mix the poison, and lift it t his lips."