Chapter 65
During the whole course of the terrible scene which was now at itsheight, one man in the jail suffered a degree of fear and mental tormentwhich had no parallel in the endurance, even of those who lay undersentence of death.
When the rioters first assembled before the building, the murdererwas roused from sleep--if such slumbers as his may have that blessedname--by the roar of voices, and the struggling of a great crowd. Hestarted up as these sounds met his ear, and, sitting on his bedstead,listened.
After a short interval of silence the noise burst out again. Stilllistening attentively, he made out, in course of time, that the jail wasbesieged by a furious multitude. His guilty conscience instantly arrayedthese men against himself, and brought the fear upon him that he wouldbe singled out, and torn to pieces.
Once impressed with the terror of this conceit, everything tended toconfirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the circumstances underwhich it had been committed, the length of time that had elapsed, andits discovery in spite of all, made him, as it were, the visible objectof the Almighty's wrath. In all the crime and vice and moral gloom ofthe great pest-house of the capital, he stood alone, marked and singledout by his great guilt, a Lucifer among the devils. The other prisonerswere a host, hiding and sheltering each other--a crowd like that withoutthe walls. He was one man against the whole united concourse; a single,solitary, lonely man, from whom the very captives in the jail fell offand shrunk appalled.
It might be that the intelligence of his capture having been bruitedabroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out and kill him inthe street; or it might be that they were the rioters, and, in pursuanceof an old design, had come to sack the prison. But in either case he hadno belief or hope that they would spare him. Every shout they raised,and every sound they made, was a blow upon his heart. As the attack wenton, he grew more wild and frantic in his terror: tried to pull away thebars that guarded the chimney and prevented him from climbing up: calledloudly on the turnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from thefury of the rabble; or put him in some dungeon underground, no matterof what depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset with rats andcreeping things, so that it hid him and was hard to find.
But no one came, or answered him. Fearful, even while he cried to them,of attracting attention, he was silent. By and bye, he saw, as he lookedfrom his grated window, a strange glimmering on the stone walls andpavement of the yard. It was feeble at first, and came and went, asthough some officers with torches were passing to and fro upon the roofof the prison. Soon it reddened, and lighted brands came whirling down,spattering the ground with fire, and burning sullenly in corners. Onerolled beneath a wooden bench, and set it in a blaze; another caught awater-spout, and so went climbing up the wall, leaving a long straighttrack of fire behind it. After a time, a slow thick shower of burningfragments, from some upper portion of the prison which was blazing nigh,began to fall before his door. Remembering that it opened outwards, heknew that every spark which fell upon the heap, and in the act lostits bright life, and died an ugly speck of dust and rubbish, helpedto entomb him in a living grave. Still, though the jail resounded withshrieks and cries for help,--though the fire bounded up as if eachseparate flame had had a tiger's life, and roared as though, in everyone, there were a hungry voice--though the heat began to grow intense,and the air suffocating, and the clamour without increased, and thedanger of his situation even from one merciless element was every momentmore extreme,--still he was afraid to raise his voice again, lestthe crowd should break in, and should, of their own ears or from theinformation given them by the other prisoners, get the clue to his placeof confinement. Thus fearful alike, of those within the prison andof those without; of noise and silence; light and darkness; of beingreleased, and being left there to die; he was so tortured and tormented,that nothing man has ever done to man in the horrible caprice of powerand cruelty, exceeds his self-inflicted punishment.
Now, now, the door was down. Now they came rushing through the jail,calling to each other in the vaulted passages; clashing the iron gatesdividing yard from yard; beating at the doors of cells and wards;wrenching off bolts and locks and bars; tearing down the door-posts toget men out; endeavouring to drag them by main force through gaps andwindows where a child could scarcely pass; whooping and yelling withouta moment's rest; and running through the heat and flames as if they werecased in metal. By their legs, their arms, the hair upon their heads,they dragged the prisoners out. Some threw themselves upon the captivesas they got towards the door, and tried to file away their irons; somedanced about them with a frenzied joy, and rent their clothes, and wereready, as it seemed, to tear them limb from limb. Now a party of a dozenmen came darting through the yard into which the murderer cast fearfulglances from his darkened window; dragging a prisoner along the groundwhose dress they had nearly torn from his body in their mad eagerness toset him free, and who was bleeding and senseless in their hands. Nowa score of prisoners ran to and fro, who had lost themselves in theintricacies of the prison, and were so bewildered with the noise andglare that they knew not where to turn or what to do, and still criedout for help, as loudly as before. Anon some famished wretch whose thefthad been a loaf of bread, or scrap of butcher's meat, came skulkingpast, barefooted--going slowly away because that jail, his house, wasburning; not because he had any other, or had friends to meet, or oldhaunts to revisit, or any liberty to gain, but liberty to starve anddie. And then a knot of highwaymen went trooping by, conducted by thefriends they had among the crowd, who muffled their fetters as they wentalong, with handkerchiefs and bands of hay, and wrapped them in coatsand cloaks, and gave them drink from bottles, and held it to their lips,because of their handcuffs which there was no time to remove. All this,and Heaven knows how much more, was done amidst a noise, a hurry, anddistraction, like nothing that we know of, even in our dreams; whichseemed for ever on the rise, and never to decrease for the space of asingle instant.
He was still looking down from his window upon these things, when a bandof men with torches, ladders, axes, and many kinds of weapons, pouredinto the yard, and hammering at his door, inquired if there were anyprisoner within. He left the window when he saw them coming, and drewback into the remotest corner of the cell; but although he returned themno answer, they had a fancy that some one was inside, for they presentlyset ladders against it, and began to tear away the bars at the casement;not only that, indeed, but with pickaxes to hew down the very stones inthe wall.
As soon as they had made a breach at the window, large enough for theadmission of a man's head, one of them thrust in a torch and looked allround the room. He followed this man's gaze until it rested on himself,and heard him demand why he had not answered, but made him no reply.
In the general surprise and wonder, they were used to this; withoutsaying anything more, they enlarged the breach until it was large enoughto admit the body of a man, and then came dropping down upon the floor,one after another, until the cell was full. They caught him up amongthem, handed him to the window, and those who stood upon the ladderspassed him down upon the pavement of the yard. Then the rest came out,one after another, and, bidding him fly, and lose no time, or the waywould be choked up, hurried away to rescue others.
It seemed not a minute's work from first to last. He staggered to hisfeet, incredulous of what had happened, when the yard was filledagain, and a crowd rushed on, hurrying Barnaby among them. In anotherminute--not so much: another minute! the same instant, with no lapse orinterval between!--he and his son were being passed from hand to hand,through the dense crowd in the street, and were glancing backward at aburning pile which some one said was Newgate.
From the moment of their first entrance into the prison, the crowddispersed themselves about it, and swarmed into every chink and crevice,as if they had a perfect acquaintance with its innermost parts, and borein their minds an exact plan of the whole. For this immediate knowledgeof the place, they were, no doubt, in a great degree, indebted to thehangman
, who stood in the lobby, directing some to go this way, somethat, and some the other; and who materially assisted in bringing aboutthe wonderful rapidity with which the release of the prisoners waseffected.
But this functionary of the law reserved one important piece ofintelligence, and kept it snugly to himself. When he had issued hisinstructions relative to every other part of the building, and the mobwere dispersed from end to end, and busy at their work, he took a bundleof keys from a kind of cupboard in the wall, and going by a kind ofpassage near the chapel (it joined the governors house, and was thenon fire), betook himself to the condemned cells, which were a series ofsmall, strong, dismal rooms, opening on a low gallery, guarded, at theend at which he entered, by a strong iron wicket, and at its oppositeextremity by two doors and a thick grate. Having double locked thewicket, and assured himself that the other entrances were well secured,he sat down on a bench in the gallery, and sucked the head of his stickwith the utmost complacency, tranquillity, and contentment.
It would have been strange enough, a man's enjoying himself in thisquiet manner, while the prison was burning, and such a tumult wascleaving the air, though he had been outside the walls. But here, in thevery heart of the building, and moreover with the prayers and criesof the four men under sentence sounding in his ears, and their hands,stretched out through the gratings in their cell-doors, clasped infrantic entreaty before his very eyes, it was particularly remarkable.Indeed, Mr Dennis appeared to think it an uncommon circumstance, and tobanter himself upon it; for he thrust his hat on one side as some men dowhen they are in a waggish humour, sucked the head of his stick with ahigher relish, and smiled as though he would say, 'Dennis, you're a rumdog; you're a queer fellow; you're capital company, Dennis, and quite acharacter!'
He sat in this way for some minutes, while the four men in the cells,who were certain that somebody had entered the gallery, but could notsee who, gave vent to such piteous entreaties as wretches in theirmiserable condition may be supposed to have been inspired with: urging,whoever it was, to set them at liberty, for the love of Heaven; andprotesting, with great fervour, and truly enough, perhaps, for the time,that if they escaped, they would amend their ways, and would never,never, never again do wrong before God or man, but would lead penitentand sober lives, and sorrowfully repent the crimes they had committed.The terrible energy with which they spoke, would have moved any person,no matter how good or just (if any good or just person could havestrayed into that sad place that night), to have set them at liberty:and, while he would have left any other punishment to its free course,to have saved them from this last dreadful and repulsive penalty; whichnever turned a man inclined to evil, and has hardened thousands who werehalf inclined to good.
Mr Dennis, who had been bred and nurtured in the good old school, andhad administered the good old laws on the good old plan, always onceand sometimes twice every six weeks, for a long time, bore these appealswith a deal of philosophy. Being at last, however, rather disturbed inhis pleasant reflection by their repetition, he rapped at one of thedoors with his stick, and cried:
'Hold your noise there, will you?'
At this they all cried together that they were to be hanged on the nextday but one; and again implored his aid.
'Aid! For what!' said Mr Dennis, playfully rapping the knuckles of thehand nearest him.
'To save us!' they cried.
'Oh, certainly,' said Mr Dennis, winking at the wall in the absenceof any friend with whom he could humour the joke. 'And so you're to beworked off, are you, brothers?'
'Unless we are released to-night,' one of them cried, 'we are dead men!'
'I tell you what it is,' said the hangman, gravely; 'I'm afraid, myfriend, that you're not in that 'ere state of mind that's suitable toyour condition, then; you're not a-going to be released: don't thinkit--Will you leave off that 'ere indecent row? I wonder you an't ashamedof yourselves, I do.'
He followed up this reproof by rapping every set of knuckles one afterthe other, and having done so, resumed his seat again with a cheerfulcountenance.
'You've had law,' he said, crossing his legs and elevating his eyebrows:'laws have been made a' purpose for you; a wery handsome prison'sbeen made a' purpose for you; a parson's kept a purpose for you;a constitootional officer's appointed a' purpose for you; carts ismaintained a' purpose for you--and yet you're not contented!--WILL youhold that noise, you sir in the furthest?'
A groan was the only answer.
'So well as I can make out,' said Mr Dennis, in a tone of mingledbadinage and remonstrance, 'there's not a man among you. I begin tothink I'm on the opposite side, and among the ladies; though for thematter of that, I've seen a many ladies face it out, in a manner thatdid honour to the sex.--You in number two, don't grind them teeth ofyours. Worse manners,' said the hangman, rapping at the door with hisstick, 'I never see in this place afore. I'm ashamed of you. You're adisgrace to the Bailey.'
After pausing for a moment to hear if anything could be pleaded injustification, Mr Dennis resumed in a sort of coaxing tone:
'Now look'ee here, you four. I'm come here to take care of you, and seethat you an't burnt, instead of the other thing. It's no use your makingany noise, for you won't be found out by them as has broken in, andyou'll only be hoarse when you come to the speeches,--which is a pity.What I say in respect to the speeches always is, "Give it mouth." That'smy maxim. Give it mouth. I've heerd,' said the hangman, pulling off hishat to take his handkerchief from the crown and wipe his face, and thenputting it on again a little more on one side than before, 'I've heerd aeloquence on them boards--you know what boards I mean--and have heerda degree of mouth given to them speeches, that they was as clear as abell, and as good as a play. There's a pattern! And always, when a thingof this natur's to come off, what I stand up for, is, a proper frame ofmind. Let's have a proper frame of mind, and we can go through with it,creditable--pleasant--sociable. Whatever you do (and I address myself inparticular, to you in the furthest), never snivel. I'd sooner by half,though I lose by it, see a man tear his clothes a' purpose to spile'em before they come to me, than find him snivelling. It's ten to one abetter frame of mind, every way!'
While the hangman addressed them to this effect, in the tone and withthe air of a pastor in familiar conversation with his flock, the noisehad been in some degree subdued; for the rioters were busy in conveyingthe prisoners to the Sessions House, which was beyond the main walls ofthe prison, though connected with it, and the crowd were busy too, inpassing them from thence along the street. But when he had got thus farin his discourse, the sound of voices in the yard showed plainly thatthe mob had returned and were coming that way; and directly afterwards aviolent crashing at the grate below, gave note of their attack upon thecells (as they were called) at last.
It was in vain the hangman ran from door to door, and covered thegrates, one after another, with his hat, in futile efforts to stiflethe cries of the four men within; it was in vain he dogged theiroutstretched hands, and beat them with his stick, or menaced themwith new and lingering pains in the execution of his office; the placeresounded with their cries. These, together with the feeling that theywere now the last men in the jail, so worked upon and stimulated thebesiegers, that in an incredibly short space of time they forced thestrong grate down below, which was formed of iron rods two inchessquare, drove in the two other doors, as if they had been but dealpartitions, and stood at the end of the gallery with only a bar or twobetween them and the cells.
'Halloa!' cried Hugh, who was the first to look into the dusky passage:'Dennis before us! Well done, old boy. Be quick, and open here, for weshall be suffocated in the smoke, going out.'
'Go out at once, then,' said Dennis. 'What do you want here?'
'Want!' echoed Hugh. 'The four men.'
'Four devils!' cried the hangman. 'Don't you know they're left for deathon Thursday? Don't you respect the law--the constitootion--nothing? Letthe four men be.'
'Is this a time for joking?' cried Hugh. 'Do you hear 'em? Pul
l awaythese bars that have got fixed between the door and the ground; and letus in.'
'Brother,' said the hangman, in a low voice, as he stooped underpretence of doing what Hugh desired, but only looked up in his face,'can't you leave these here four men to me, if I've the whim! Youdo what you like, and have what you like of everything for yourshare,--give me my share. I want these four men left alone, I tell you!'
'Pull the bars down, or stand out of the way,' was Hugh's reply.
'You can turn the crowd if you like, you know that well enough,brother,' said the hangman, slowly. 'What! You WILL come in, will you?'
'Yes.'
'You won't let these men alone, and leave 'em to me? You've no respectfor nothing--haven't you?' said the hangman, retreating to the door bywhich he had entered, and regarding his companion with a scowl. 'YouWILL come in, will you, brother!'
'I tell you, yes. What the devil ails you? Where are you going?'
'No matter where I'm going,' rejoined the hangman, looking in again atthe iron wicket, which he had nearly shut upon himself, and held ajar.'Remember where you're coming. That's all!'
With that, he shook his likeness at Hugh, and giving him a grin,compared with which his usual smile was amiable, disappeared, and shutthe door.
Hugh paused no longer, but goaded alike by the cries of the convicts,and by the impatience of the crowd, warned the man immediately behindhim--the way was only wide enough for one abreast--to stand back, andwielded a sledge-hammer with such strength, that after a few blows theiron bent and broke, and gave them free admittance.
If the two sons of one of these men, of whom mention has been made,were furious in their zeal before, they had now the wrath and vigour oflions. Calling to the man within each cell, to keep as far back as hecould, lest the axes crashing through the door should wound him, a partywent to work upon each one, to beat it in by sheer strength, and forcethe bolts and staples from their hold. But although these two lads hadthe weakest party, and the worst armed, and did not begin until afterthe others, having stopped to whisper to him through the grate, thatdoor was the first open, and that man was the first out. As they draggedhim into the gallery to knock off his irons, he fell down among them,a mere heap of chains, and was carried out in that state on men'sshoulders, with no sign of life.
The release of these four wretched creatures, and conveying them,astounded and bewildered, into the streets so full of life--a spectaclethey had never thought to see again, until they emerged from solitudeand silence upon that last journey, when the air should be heavy withthe pent-up breath of thousands, and the streets and houses shouldbe built and roofed with human faces, not with bricks and tiles andstones--was the crowning horror of the scene. Their pale and haggardlooks and hollow eyes; their staggering feet, and hands stretched out asif to save themselves from falling; their wandering and uncertain air;the way they heaved and gasped for breath, as though in water, when theywere first plunged into the crowd; all marked them for the men. No needto say 'this one was doomed to die;' for there were the words broadlystamped and branded on his face. The crowd fell off, as if they had beenlaid out for burial, and had risen in their shrouds; and many were seento shudder, as though they had been actually dead men, when they chancedto touch or brush against their garments.
At the bidding of the mob, the houses were all illuminated thatnight--lighted up from top to bottom as at a time of public gaiety andjoy. Many years afterwards, old people who lived in their youth nearthis part of the city, remembered being in a great glare of light,within doors and without, and as they looked, timid and frightenedchildren, from the windows, seeing a FACE go by. Though the whole greatcrowd and all its other terrors had faded from their recollection, thisone object remained; alone, distinct, and well remembered. Even in theunpractised minds of infants, one of these doomed men darting past,and but an instant seen, was an image of force enough to dim the wholeconcourse; to find itself an all-absorbing place, and hold it everafter.
When this last task had been achieved, the shouts and cries grewfainter; the clank of fetters, which had resounded on all sides asthe prisoners escaped, was heard no more; all the noises of the crowdsubsided into a hoarse and sullen murmur as it passed into the distance;and when the human tide had rolled away, a melancholy heap of smokingruins marked the spot where it had lately chafed and roared.
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty Page 65