It Is Never Too Late to Mend Part 31

With these words ringing in his ears, little Gillies was locked up for the night at six o'clock. His companions darkness and unrest-for a prisoner's bed is the most comfortable thing he has, and the change from it to a stone floor is as great to him as it would be to us--darkness and unrest, and the cat waiting to spring on him at peep of day. Quae c.u.m ita erant, as the warder put the key into his cell the next morning he heard a strange gurgling; he opened the door quickly, and there was little Gillies hanging; a chair was near him on which he had got to suspend himself by his handkerchief from the window; he was black in the face, but struggling violently, and had one hand above his head convulsively clutching the handkerchief. Fry lifted him up by the knees and with some difficulty loosed the handkerchief.

Little Gillies, as soon as his throat could vent a sound, roared with fright at the recent peril, and then cried a bit, finally expressed a hope his breakfast would not be taken from him for this act of insubordination.

This infraction of discipline was immediately reported to the governor.

"Little brute," cried Hawes, viciously, "I'll work him!"

"Oh! he knew I was at hand, sir," said Fry, "or he would not have tried it."

"Of course he would not; I remember last night he was grumbling at his bed being taken away. I'll serve him out!"

Soon after this the governor met the chaplain and told him the case. "He shall make you an apology"--imperative mood him.

"Me, an apology!"

"Of course--you are the officer that has the care of his soul and he shall apologize to you for making away with it or trying it on."

This resolution was conveyed to Gillies with fearful threats, so when the chaplain visited him he had got his lesson pat.

"I beg your reverence's pardon for hanging myself," began he at sight, rather loud and as bold as bra.s.s.

"Beg the Almighty's pardon, not mine."

"No! the governor said it was yours I was to beg," demurred Gillies.

"Very well. But you should beg G.o.d's pardon more than mine."

"For why, sir?"

"For attempting your life, which was His gift."

"Oh! I needn't beg His pardon; He doesn't care what becomes of me; if He did He wouldn't let them bully me as they do day after day, drat 'em."

"I am sorry to see one so young as you so hardened. I dare say the discipline of the jail is bitter to you, it is to all idle boys; but you might be in a much worse place--and will if you do not mend."

"A worse place than this, your reverence! Oh, my eye!"

"And you ought to be thankful to Heaven for sending the turnkey at that moment (here I'm sorry to say little Gillies grinned satirically), or you would be in a worse place. Would you rather be here or in h.e.l.l?"

half asked, half explained the reverend gentleman in the superior tone of one closing a discussion forever.

"In h.e.l.l!!!" replied Gillies, opening his eyes with astonishment at the doubt.

Mr. Jones was dumfounded; of all the mischances that befall us in argument this coup perplexes us most. He looked down at the little ignorant wretch, and decided it would be useless to waste theology on him. He fell instead into familiar conversation with him, and then Gillies, with the natural communicativeness of youth, confessed to him "that he had heard the warder at the next cell before he ventured to step off the chair and suspend himself."

"Well! but you ran a great risk, too. Suppose he had not come into your cell--suppose he had been called away for a minute."

"I should have been scragged, and no mistake," said the boy, with a shiver. Throttling had proved no joke. "But I took my chance of that,"

added Gillies. "I was determined to give them a fright; besides, if he hadn't come, it would all be over by now, sir, and all the better for me, I know."

Further communication was closed by the crank, which demanded young Hopeful by its mouthpiece, Fry. After dinner, to his infinite disgust, he received the other moiety of his flogging; but by a sort of sulky compensation his bed was kicked into his cell again at night by Fry acting under the governor's orders.

"That was not a bad move, hanging myself a little--a very little,"

said the young prig. He hooked up his recovered treasure; and, though smarting all over, coiled himself up in it, and in three minutes forgot present pain, past dangers and troubles to come.

The plan pursued with Robinson was to keep him at low-water mark by lowering his diet; without this, so great was his natural energy and disposition to work, that no crank excuse could have been got for punishing him, and at this period he was too wise and self-restrained to give any other. But after a few days of unjust torture he began to lose hope; and with hope patience oozed away too, and his enemy saw with grim satisfaction wild flashes of mad rage come every now and then to his eye, harder and harder to suppress. "He will break out before long,"

said Hawes to himself, "and then--"

Robinson saw the game, and a deep dark hatred of his enemy fought on the side of his prudence. This bitter raging struggle of contending pa.s.sions in the thief's heart harmed his soul more than had years of burglary and petty larceny. All the vices of the old jail system are nothing compared with the diabolical effect of solitude on a heart smarting with daily wrongs.

Brooding on self is always corrupting; but to brood on self and wrongs is to ripen for madness, murder and all crime. Between Robinson and these there lay one little bit of hope--only one, but it was a reasonable one. There was an official in the jail possessed of a large independent authority; and paid (Robinson argued) to take the side of humanity in the place. This man was the representative of the national religion in the jail, as Hawes was of the law. Robinson was too sharp at picking up everything in his way, and had been too often in prisons and their chapels not to know that cruelty and injustice are contrary to the Gospel, and to the national religion, which is in a great measure founded thereon. He therefore hoped and believed the chaplain of the jail would come between him and his persecutor if he could be made to understand the case. Now it happened just after the justices had thrown cold water on Mr. Jones's little expostulation that Robinson was pinned to the wall, jammed in the waistcoat, and throttled in the collar. He had been thus some time, when, casting his despairing eyes around they alighted upon the comely, respectable face of Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones was looking gravely at the victim.

Robinson devoured him with his eyes and his ears. He heard him say in an undertone:

"What is this for?"

"Hasn't done his work at the crank," was the answer.

Then Mr. Jones, after taking another look at the sufferer, gave a sigh and walked away. Robinson's hopes from this gentleman rose; moreover, part of his sermon next Sunday inveighed against inhumanity; and Robinson, who had no conception the sermon was several years old, looked on it as aimed at Hawes and his myrmidons and as the precursor of other and effective remonstrances. Not long after this, to his delight, the chaplain visited him alone. He seized this opportunity of securing the good man's interference in his favor. He told him in glowing words the whole story of his sufferings; and with a plain and manly eloquence appealed to him to make his chapel words good and come between the bloodhounds and their prey.

"Sir, there are twenty or thirty poor fellows besides me that will bless your four bones night and day, if you will but put out your hand and save us from being abused like dogs and nailed to the wall like kites and weasels. We are not vermin, sir, we are men. Many a worse man is abroad than we that are caged here like wild beasts. Our bodies are men's bodies, sir, and our hearts are men's hearts. You can't soften _their_ hearts, for they haven't such a thing about them; but only just you open your mouth and speak your mind in right-down earnest, and you will shame them into treating us openly like human beings, let them hate us and scorn us at bottom as they will. We have no friend here, sir, but you, not one; have pity on us! have pity on us!"

And the thief stretched out his hands, and fixed his ardent, glistening eyes upon the successor of the apostles.

The successor of the apostles hung his head and showed plainly that he was not unmoved. A moment of suspense followed--Robinson hung upon his answer. At length Mr. Jones raised his head and said, with icy coldness:

"Mr. Hawes is the governor of this jail. I have no power to interfere with his acts, supported as they are by the visiting justices; and I have but one advice to give you: Submit to the discipline and to Mr.

Hawes in everything; it will be the worse for you if you don't."

So saying, he went out abruptly, leaving his pet.i.tioner with his eyes fixed ruefully upon the door by which his last hope had left him.

The moment the reverend official had got outside the door, his countenance, which had fallen, took a complacent air. He prided himself that he had conquered an impulse, an idle impulse.

"The poor fellow is in the right," said he to himself as he left the cell; "but if I had let him see I thought so, he might have been encouraged to resist, and then he would have only suffered all the more."

And so, having done what he calculated was the expedient thing to do, he went his way satisfied and at peace with Mr. Hawes and all mankind.

When he glided away and took hope with him, disdain, despair and frenzy gushed from the thief's boiling bosom in one wild moan; and with that moan he dashed himself on his face on the floor, though it was as hard as Hawes and cold as Jones.

Thus he lay crushed in blank despair a moment, the next he rose fiercely to his knees, he looked up through the hole they called his window, and saw a little piece of blue sky no bigger than a Bible, he held his hand up to that blue sky, he fixed his dilating eye on that blue sky, and with one long raging yell of horrible words hurled from a heart set on fire by wrongs and despair and tempting fiends, he cursed the successor of the apostles before the Majesty of Heaven.

CHAPTER XIII.

SOLITUDE is no barrier whatever to sin. Such prayers as Robinson's are a disgrace to those who provoke them, but a calamity to him who utters them. Robinson was now a far worse man than ever he had been out of prison. The fiend had fixed a claw in his heart, and we may be sure he felt the recoil of his ill prayers. He hated the human race, which produced such creatures as Hawes and nothing to keep them in check.

"From this hour I speak no more to any of those beasts!"