The years went on, and she got older; no rescue home would have her, for I tried them all. No corner of the world would have her, for I tried the various emigration societies in London, and though the necessary money would have been forthcoming to pay for her outfit, voyage, etc., no one would have her; so I clothed her decently and brought her home. Three days she stayed with us, and the thought of her child maddened her; the lust for liberty and drink came upon her, and about ten o’clock at night away she sped, on and on, for the devil lent her wings, till down in the old neighbourhood she found herself. A wild joy and a fierce fight followed. The next morning, when I went into the female prisoners’ waiting-room, she lay on the floor with cut head and bruised face, her bonnet all smashed, her clothes all torn.
Now, Adams was naturally a kind and timid woman. When in the cells she was quiet, when before the magistrate respectful, when in prison well-behaved; but the devils of sensuality, drink, and despair had made their abode within her, and they led her whereso’er they would. The years went on and she still kept it up; bronchitis seemed to get fast hold upon her, and it was wonderful to me how she lived. Probably it was the frequent detentions in prison that kept her alive, for her name became notorious, and her record was next only to that of Cakebread. Again Lady Henry Somerset wrote me, ‘Bring her down to Duxhurst.’ Many might have considered that the residue of her days were not worth saving; yet I took her, and though Lady Henry knew that to receive her was to receive a broken, almost dying, piece of humanity, she received her. Two years she stayed there, and they were two years of peace. She proved docile, obedient, kind, and trustworthy. But again Nature had its own. She manifested symptoms of a disease that could only be treated in a London hospital, and she was sent for treatment. It did not succeed, and she soon passed away.
In one of the rooms at Duxhurst is a tablet kindly placed there to her memory, and it tells of her goodness whilst an inmate of that institution. Somewhere in one of our great London cemeteries, deep down she lies--I know not where. Somewhere out in the world is her child, now a man. He knows the life of shame and notoriety his mother lived. For years, her hope was to see him, and to her doom she went with that hope unfulfilled. If he is ‘respectable,’ I at least hope he is not hard or bitter, and that he lets the knowledge that she had a passionate love for him draw a thick veil over the main part of her sad life.