The fact was that I felt exceedingly glad that a blackguard had got his desserts, but I felt more glad, nay, even touched, that the Ishmaelite had some respect and regard for me. So I walked over to her corner and, taking her hand, said: ‘Kate, it was very good of you to take my part. I am very much obliged to you.’ She looked up--for the first time I saw a softened look in her face and a tear in her eye--and said: ‘Mr. Holmes, after all your kindness to me, if I get locked up again, I will kill myself.’ But of course she did get locked up again. As two officers were taking her up the Old Kent Road, almost destitute of clothing, she broke from them when crossing the Surrey Canal, and in an instant was over the wall of the bridge, and down she went. She fell half in the water and half on the bank, but, never heeding her broken arm or cut head, she rolled over into the canal, whence with difficulty she was rescued and was afterwards charged with attempted suicide. This was the last time but one that she stood in the dock at Lambeth Police Court, and I wish that I had a picture of her as she stood there, barefooted, poor, thin, short dress, her head enveloped in surgical bandages, her right arm bound up in splints. Two hundred and fifty times she had stood there, two hundred and fifty times she had been sent to the refining influences of prison, to be redeemed and regenerated by the delightful task of oakum-picking, sack-making or scrubbing floors. Two hundred and fifty times the law had said to her, ‘You shall not.’ Two hundred and fifty times she had defied the law, had hugged her vices, and said, ‘I will.’
But this time she was quiet and said not a word, and the magistrate, a wise and big-hearted man, did not send her to prison. He remanded her on her own bail, and she went to a place other than prison. It was summer-time, and there were flowers to smile at her; she could look through her window, and the birds sang to her; kind nurses waited on her; her heart became tender, and the scream of the wild beast died away. She had again to come before the court, when the days of her remand had expired, and she stood there clothed in her right mind. How long will it be before we as a nation learn that the human heart is like a bar of iron? Hammer, hammer, hammer it cold, and you can make nothing of it; closer and harder, closer and harder does it become. Only under the softening influences of warmth can it be shaped to a thing of beauty and utility. So the law may punish, punish, punish its Kate Henesseys, but the more and still more do its Kate Henesseys defy the law, the harder and still harder do their hearts become.
