Of her past history other than police court I know nothing. I never inquired of her, preferring always to shut it out, and to fix her mind and hopes on the future. She was intelligent, and fairly well educated, but where she came from and where her friends lived she never told us. Neither did we seek to win her from the Roman Catholic faith, and a card hanging at the head of her bed told us that while dying she had been ministered to by a priest of her own Church. She was a generous soul, coarse and wild though she had become. It was her generosity that led her to leave us. She had premonitions of the coming end, and wished to put us to no trouble or expense, and doubtless her heart went back to the faith of her youth and happier days. And so she passed from us, but not from our memory, for of none that we have known and cared for have we such kindly recollections as we have of the wild Irishwoman Susan Hurley.
But we have had women living with us whose presence did not conduce to our happiness, but rather to anxiety, not unmingled with fear, for whose departure we fervently hoped and hoped for a long time in vain, for we have never said ‘Begone!’ to the worst of them.
A frightful tragedy is compressed into the life of any man or woman who earnestly and sincerely strives to do right and yet is impelled by some strange inward power--a power that they never understand--to do absolutely wrong. Bordering for years on the verge of insanity, they form a more dangerous class and an infinitely more pitiful spectacle than those altogether mad. Clever, generous, and high-spirited, they are subject to fits of depression, unjust suspicions and violent paroxysms of rage, and woe be to anyone that offends them! When the period of unrest comes upon such, the least drop of alcohol sends them raging mad, and they become possessed of the ferocity of tigers.
Such was Annie Drayton. At thirty-six years of age she had been charged repeatedly, and in many of our courts. Her honesty was undoubted, her industry was phenomenal, not the slightest taint of immorality about her, with positively no passion or desire for drink, yet repeatedly charged with drunkenness, she constituted a problem in herself. She had never known parents, brothers, sisters, or any friends, for she was brought up in a school for foundlings, was fairly well educated, and had held very good situations. Tall in stature, and exceedingly genteel in appearance, she never had, although so often charged, the least appearance of the police court habitué. Her hair, prematurely gray in front, told of repeated pains in the head. Some wrongs, or fancied wrongs, that she had suffered had converted her into an Ishmaelite. Generally she was charged in the western districts, where she was well known to some of my colleagues. Several times she was charged in North London, and then I met with her. She had been in many rescue homes, where they gladly got rid of her; she had been sent to Duxhurst to be cured of inebriety; she assaulted poor Cakebread, and had to be sent away. She had been in Mrs. Bramwell Booth’s home, and they had to call in the police and charge her with violence and wilful damage. She had been sent by the prison chaplain to the Elizabeth Fry refuge, where she terrorized them, and the police had again to be called in. When in the cells she tried to hang herself, when in the dock she stood defiant, her eyes full of fury, her hair hanging down, her dress all torn and bespattered with blood.