CHAPTER V.
The Bluff Hill penitentiary was called “a model prison.” A “modern Howard” was said to have planned it, and passed his oracular judgment, ratified by the authorities of the State in which it was located, upon its cells, prison-yards, work-shops, chapel, eating-rooms, and ingenious instruments of torture.
That the furnaces failed to keep the prisoners from freezing in winter, or that there was no proper ventilation in summer, was, therefore, nobody’s meddling business. Better that they should suffer, year in and year out, than that a flaw should be publicly picked in any scheme set afoot by the “modern Howard.” The officers elected to preside over Bluff Hill prison, were as stony as its walls, and showed curious visitors round the work-shops, amid its rows of pallid faces, pointing out here a disgraced clergyman, there a ruined lawyer, yonder a wrecked merchant, with as much nonchalance as a brutal keeper would stir up the caged beasts in a menagerie, for the amusement of the crowd; with as little thought that these fallen beings were men and brothers, as if the Omniscient eye noted no dark stain of sin, hidden from human sight, on their souls.
They gave you leave to stop as long as you pleased, and watch the muscles of your victim’s face, work with emotion under your gaze. You could take your own time to speculate upon the scowl of defiance, or the set teeth of hate, as you flaunted leisurely past their prison uniform, in your silk and broadcloth; or you could stand under the fair blue sky, in the prison-yard, when the roll beat for dinner, and see them in file, by twos—guarded—march with locked step and folded arms, to their eating-room. The beardless boy branded in your remembering eye for life, wherever you might hereafter meet him, for this his first crime, how hard soever against fearful odds, he might struggle upward to virtue and heaven. You might follow the sad procession to thair meals, where the fat, comfortably-fed chaplain craved a blessing over food, from which the very dog at his door would have turned hungry away; or you could go into the prison hospital, and view the accommodation (?) for the sick—the cots so narrow that a man could not turn in them; or you could investigate “The Douche,” which the keeper would tell you, with a bland smile, “conquered even old prison birds;” or you could peep into the cells (philanthropically furnished by this “modern Howard” with a Bible), so dark that at the brightest noonday no prisoner could read a syllable; or you could see the row of coffins standing on an end in the hall, kept on hand “for sudden emergencies;” or any other horrors of the place, for which your morbid curiosity was appetized.
Or, if you had a human heart beating within your breast, if you could remember ever kneeling to ask forgiveness of your God, you could turn away soul-sick from such unfeeling exhibitions, and refuse to insult their misery—fallen as they were—by your curious gaze. You could remember in your own experience, moments of fearful temptation, when the hot blood poured like molten lead through your veins. You could place in the balance, as God does—as man does not—neglected childhood—undisciplined youth. You could remember, that at a kindly word, whispered in those felon cars, the hardest rock might melt; and you could wish that if prisons must be, they who pass under their iron portals might pass unrecognizable in after life by the world’s stony eyes—you could wish that when freedom’s air again fanned their pallid temples, no cursed scornful finger might lash to fury the hydra-headed monster Sin, in their scarred hearts.
Heaven speed the day when the legislative heart, pitiful as God’s, shall temper this sword of justice with more mercy.
“Which is he?” asked an over-dressed, chubby, vulgar-looking fellow, to the keeper of Bluff Hill prison.
“That tall fellow yonder,” replied the keeper, “with the straight nose, and high forehead—that’s he—see? reefing off flax yonder.”
“Don’t say,” said the man, with his bloated eyes gloating over Percy. “How old is he?”
“Nineteen only,” said the keeper.
“Humph!” said the man, loud enough for Percy to hear—“Pre—co—cious; wasn’t intended for that sort of work, I fancy, by the look of his hands; they are as small and white as a woman’s. Ask him some question, can’t ye? I wish I was keeper here; I’d like to break his spirit,” said Mr. Scraggs, as Percy answered the keeper’s question without raising his eyes. “Bah! how these fuzzy bits of lint and flax fly about the room; my throat and nose are full. I should think this would kill a fellow off before long.”
“It does,” said the keeper, coolly.
“And what’s that horrible smell? Faugh—it makes me sick.”
“That? Oh, that’s the oil used in the machinery.”
“Why the fury don’t you ventilate, then?” asked Mr. Scraggs, thinking more of his own lungs than the prisoners’, adding, with a laugh, as he recollected himself, “I don’t suppose the Governor of your State is particular on that p’int;” then, with another stare at Percy, he said, “they say he seduced old Ford’s daughter before he stole the money.”
The words had hardly left his lips, when, with a bound like a panther, Percy instantly felled him to the earth, the blood spouting from his own mouth and nostrils with the violence of his passion.
Scraggs lay for some hours insensible, though not dangerously wounded, and Percy was led off in irons, to reflect on this new misery in solitary confinement.