Part 60 (1/2)

The turnkey whispered suddenly into my ear: ”Them's the condemned he's preaching at, them in the black pew. See Roguey Cullen wink at the woman prisoners up there in the gallery.... Him with the red hair.... All swings to-morrow.”

”After they have staggered and reeled to and fro, and been amazed...

observe. After they have been tempted; even after they have fallen....”

The sheriffs had their eyes decorously closed. The clerk reached up from below the preacher, and snuffed one of the candles. The preacher paused to rearrange his s.h.i.+ning wig. Little clouds of powder flew out where he touched it. He struck his purple velvet cus.h.i.+on, and continued:

”At the last, I say, He shall bring them to the haven they had desired.”

A jarring shriek rose out of the black pew, and an insensate jangling of irons rattled against the hollow wood. The ironed man, whose head had been hidden, was writhing in an epileptic fit. The governor began signalling to the jailers, and the whole dismal a.s.sembly rose to its feet, and craned to get a sight. The jailers began hurrying them out of the building. The redheaded man was crouching in the far corner of the black box.

The turnkey caught the end of my sleeve, and hurried me out of the door.

”Come away,” he said. ”Come out of it.... d.a.m.n my good nature.”

We went swiftly through the tall, gloomy, echoing stone pa.s.sages. All the time there was the noise of the prisoners being marshalled somewhere into their distant yards and cells. We went across the bottom of a well, where the weeping December light struck ghastly down on to the stones, into a sort of rabbit-warren of black pa.s.sages and descending staircases, a horror of cold, solitude, and night. Iron door after iron door clanged to behind us in the stony blackness. After an interminable traversing, the turnkey, still with his hand on my sleeve, jerked me into my familiar cell. I hadn't thought to be glad to get back to that dim, frozen, damp-chilled little hole; with its hateful stone walls, stone ceiling, stone floor, stone bed-slab, and stone table; its rope mat, foul stable-blanket, its horrible sense of eternal burial, out of sound, out of sight under a mined mountain of black stones. It was so tiny that the turnkey, entering after me, seemed to be pressed close up to my chest, and so dark that I could not see the colour of the dirty hair that fell matted from the bald patch on the top of his skull; so familiar that I knew the feel of every little worming of rust on the iron candlestick. He wiped his face with a brown rag of handkerchief, and said:

”Curse me if ever I go into that place again.” After a time he added: ”Unless 'tis a matter of duty.”

I didn't say anything; my nerves were still jangling to that shrieking, and to the clang of the iron doors that had closed behind me. I had an irresistible impulse to get hold of the iron candlestick and smash it home through the skull of the turnkey--as I had done to the men who had killed Seraphina's father... to kill this man, then to creep along the black pa.s.sages and murder man after man beside those iron doors until I got to the open air.

He began again. ”You'd think we'd get used to it--you'd think we would--but 'tis a strain for us. You never knows what the prisoners will do at a scene like that there. It drives 'em mad. Look at this scar.

Mach.e.l.l the forger done that for me, 'fore he was condemned, after a sermon like that--a quiet, gentlemanly man, much like you. Lord, yes, 'tis a strain....” He paused, still wiping his face, then went on: ”_And_ I swear that when I sees them men sit there in that black pew, an' hev heard the hammers going clack, clack on the scaffolding outside, and knew that they hadn't no more chance than you have to get out of there...” He pointed his short thumb towards the handkerchief of an opening, where the little blurr of blue light wavered through the two iron frames crossed in the nine feet of well. ”Lord, you _never_ gets used to it. You _wants_ them to escape; 'tis in the air through the whole prison, even the debtors. I tells myself again and again, 'You're a fool for your pains.' But it's the same with the others--my mates. You can't get it out of your mind. That little kid now. I've seen children swing; but that little kid--as sure to swing as what... as what _you_ are....”

”You think I am going to swing?” I asked.

I didn't want to kill him any more; I wanted too much to hear him talk. I hadn't heard anything for months and months of solitude, of darkness--on board the admiral's s.h.i.+p, stranded in the guards.h.i.+p at Plymouth, b.u.mping round the coast, and now here in Newgate. And it had been darkness all the time. Jove! That Cuban time, with its movements, its pettiness, its intrigue, its warmth, even its villainies showed plainly enough in the chill of that blackness. It had been romance, that life.

Little, and far away, and irrevocably done with, it showed all golden.

There wasn't any romance where I lay then; and there had been irons on my wrists; gruff hatred, the darkness, and always despair.

On board the flags.h.i.+p coming home I had been chained down in the cable-tier--a place where I could feel every straining of the great s.h.i.+p. Once these had risen to a pandemonium, a frightful tumult. There was a great gale outside. A sailor came down with a lanthorn, and tossed my biscuit to me.

”You d------d pirate,” he said, ”maybe it's you saving us from drowning.”

”Is the gale very bad?” I had called.

He muttered--and the fact that he spoke to me at all showed how great the strain of the weather must have been to wring any words out of him:

”Bad--there's a large Indiaman gone. We saw her one minute and then...”

He went away, muttering.

And suddenly the thought had come to me. What if the Indiaman were the _Lion_--the _Lion_ with Seraphina on board? The man would not speak to me when he came again. No one would speak to me; I was a pirate who had fired on his own countrymen. And the thought had pursued me right into Newgate--if she were dead; if I had taken her from that security, from that peace, to end there.... And to end myself.

”Swing!” the turnkey said; ”you'll swing right enough.” He slapped the great key on his flabby hand. ”You can tell that by the signs. You, being an Admiralty case, ought to have been in the Marshalsea. And you're ordered solitary cell, and I'm tipped the straight wink against your speaking a blessed word to a blessed soul. Why don't they let you see an attorney? Why? Because they _mean_ you to swing.”

I said, ”Never mind that. Have you heard of a s.h.i.+p called the _Lion?_ Can you find out about her?”

He shook his head cunningly, and did not answer. If the _Lion_ had been here, I must have heard. They couldn't have left me here.

I said, ”For G.o.d's sake find out. Get me a s.h.i.+pping gazette.”

He affected not to hear.