CHAPTER XXXIII.
IN COUPLES.
What tender-nurtured boy, newly-arrived at school—that Paradise when looked back upon from afar, that Inferno of the present—has not awakened from sweet dreams of home with a heavy heart? Who has not pictured to himself the weary months that must elapse before he once more regains his freedom and his friends? The burden (one may say) is light, but then the back is also weak that bears it. It is a genuine woe. Something of this, but tenfold in intensity of wretchedness, did Richard feel when he awoke for the first time a convicted felon. He had dreamed that Carew was dead, and left him heir of Crompton; his mother and he were there, and Harry as his wife. The splendor of the house, the beauty of the grand domain about it, were as vividly presented to him as when he saw them with his eyes; and they were all his own. The hope of his youth, the desire of his manhood, were gratified to the uttermost; yet through all ran an undercurrent which mirrored a portion of the present reality. In the marshy pond where he had fought the Squire by moonlight lay two bodies; it was shallow, as it really had been, and he could see their faces as he peered into the water: they were those of Coe and Trevethick. He kept them there, and would not have the pond dragged; but would go thither and gloat upon them for half a summer's day. The mansion was full of gay folks—his old town companions invited to visit him, and behold his greatness (as he had often imagined they should be): Tub Ryll was his jester now, and Parson Whymper his "chaplain." They were all playing pool as usual, and he was just about to make an easy hazard, when somebody jogged his elbow. It was the warder of the jail.
"Come, come—this won't do," said he, gruffly. "You must jump up when the bell rings, or we shall quarrel. Fold up your hammock, and clean your room."
Even the school-boy does not begin on his first morning to reckon on his chimney almanac, "One day gone; twenty-four hours nearer to the holidays;" and how should Richard make that cheerful note, who had twenty years of prison life before him, save one day!
He did as he was ordered, wearily, with a heart that had no hope: it seemed to the warder that his air was sullen.
"If this happens again, young fellow, I report you; and then good-by to your V G's."
He did not mean to be brutal; but Richard could have stabbed him where he stood. There were times to come when the temptation to commit such an act was to be very strong within him; and when no thought of punishment, far less of right, restrained him, but that of his projected vengeance always did. Every rough word, every insult, every wrong, was treasured up in his mind, and added to the long account against those who had doomed him to such a fate. It should be paid in full one day; and in the mean time the debt was out at compound interest.
He took his sordid meals, his cocoa, his bread, his gruel, not because he had ever any appetite for them, but because without them he should lose his strength. He must husband that for the long-expected hour when he might need it; when the moment had arrived to strike the blow for which his hand was clenched ten times a day. His hate grew every hour, and, like a petrifying spring, fell drop by drop about his heart, and made it stone. In the mean time, a fiend in torment could alone imagine what he suffered. He spoke to no one but his warders and the chaplain; for now he was a convict, there was no communication with his fellows; only once a day for an hour and a half he took his monotonous exercise in the high-walled prison-yard. Tramp, tramp, tramp, each half a dozen paces behind the other, with an officer on the watch to see that the limit was preserved.
"Keep your distance, you there, unless you want to be reported."
Richard did not want that; but at times his temper was like a devil unchained, and it got the better of him, and even of his treasured purpose; he sometimes returned a sharp answer. This weakness was almost the only feeling within him that reminded him that he was human. He was put on bread and water within the first fortnight; then cursed his folly for thus postponing the one object of his life, and amended. His case was quoted to the visiting justices as an exemplification of the efficacy of cutting short a prisoner's supplies.
While exercising one day he recognized Balfour, who happened to be on the opposite side of the ever-moving circle: the old jail-bird, without glancing toward him, threw his open hands out twice. By this he conveyed to him that his own sentence was also twenty years. During the nine months that Richard remained at Cross Key, this was all that happened to him which could be called an incident. At the end of three months his mother essayed to visit him, but he would not see her. She had been ill, it seemed, ever since that dreadful day of the trial, and was only just convalescent; she had had lodgings in the town, within a hundred yards of him, ever since: it was something, poor soul, to know that she was near him, however inexorably separated. "It would please him," she wrote, "to learn that, through Mr. Whymper's intercession, Carew had continued her pension. She had money enough, therefore, and to spare, but intended to go on with her business of lodging-house keeping in a new quarter of London, and under another name (that of Basil), that she might save, and her Richard find himself a rich man when he regained his liberty. In fifteen years—she had discovered that his time could be remitted to that extent—there would be quite a little fortune for him. In the mean time, she thought of him night and day." But there was something else in the letter. "She confessed that in her agony at his dreadful doom, she had written to his prosecutor to adjure him to appeal for mercy to the crown, and he had refused to do so." This news had driven Richard almost to frenzy. He had written her such a letter as the prison authorities had refused to send, and now he would not see her.
He wrote again; more moderately, however, to bid her never mention Trevethick's name again, nor Coe's, nor Harry's, if she wished him to think of her as his mother: they were dead to him, he said, for the present. To be brief, Richard never saw his mother after his conviction. He wished to harden his heart, and not to have it melted within him; and perhaps his fury at her having appealed to Trevethick was purposely exaggerated with this object. His recollection of "the cage," it must be remembered, was also not such as to make the idea of an interview attractive; moreover, that his mother should see him in his convict dress, kept within iron bars like a wild beast, seemed to him to afford a triumph to his deadly enemies.
In the tenth month, Richard, with the other convicts, was transferred to Lingmoor, one of the great penal settlements. They were "removed," for some portion of the distance, in vans, like furniture, or, we might rather say, in caravans like wild beasts; but for some miles they traveled by railway. They were handcuffed and chained together two and two, as pointers are upon their journeys, except that the connection was at the wrist instead of the neck. Silence was strictly enjoined, but this one opportunity of conversing with their fellow-creatures was not to be let slip. Richard's other half was a notorious burglar called Rolfe; this man had passed a quarter of a century in jail, and was conversant with every plan of trickery and evasion of orders. His countenance was not at all of that bull-dog type with which his class is falsely though generally credited; he had good features, though somewhat hard in their expression, and very intelligent gray eyes. It was their very intelligence, so sharp, so piercing, and yet which avoided your gaze, that showed to those who studied such matters what he was. After one glance at Richard he never looked at him again, but stared straight before him, and talked in muttered tones unceasingly, and with lips as motionless as those of a ventriloquist. He was doing fourteen years for cracking a public-house, and had cracked a good many private ones, concerning the details of which enterprises he was very eloquent. When he had concluded his autobiography he began to evince some interest in the circumstances of his companion. Richard, however, did not care to enlighten him on his own concerns, but confined his conversation to the one topic that was common between them—jails. Rolfe gave him a synopsis of the annals of Lingmoor, to which he was bound not for the first time. It was a place that had a bad reputation among those who became perforce its inmates; tobacco, for which elsewhere convenient warders charged a shilling an ounce, was there not less than eighteenpence: such a tariff was shameful, and almost amounted to a prohibition. A pal of his had hung himself there—it was supposed through deprivation of this necessary. It was "a queer case;" for he had "tucked himself up" to the bars of his cell by his braces, the buckles of which had left livid marks upon his neck. His Prayer-book had been found open at the Burial of the Dead, and it was understood that he had read that service over himself before taking leave of the world. He had also written his will with a point of the said brace-buckles upon the brick of his cell. He himself (Mr. Rolfe) had been called as a witness at the inquest, and had thereby obtained two hours' relaxation from labor; but upon the whole he would rather have been working with his gang—the affair had quite upset him; and, since its occurrence, the inmates of Lingmoor were forbidden to use braces.
"Were there any escapes from Lingmoor by any other means?" inquired
Richard.
"Escapes?" Mr. Rolfe's countenance assumed a more solemn vacuity than ever. It was an indiscretion of his young friend to shape that word with his lips while a warder sat in the same carriage. Yes, there had been such things even at Lingmoor. But it was a difficult job, even for one used to cracking cribs. The outer wall was not to be scaled without a ladder, and ladders were even more difficult to procure than tobacco. Even if you did get over the outer wall, the space around the prison was very bare, and the sentries had orders to shoot you fleeing. If you got to Bergen Wood, two miles away, you might be safe so far, but it was a dangerous business. Nobody had ever done it yet without "putting somebody out."
This was a euphemism for murder, as Richard was by this time "old hand" enough to know.
"Warders?" inquired he indifferently; for he had already learned to value that objectionable class at a low figure.
"Hush! Yes; you must kill 'a dog' or two before you say good-by to Lingmoor, unless you can put them to sleep." (Bribery.) "There was a man once as had to kill his pal to do it."
"How could that help him?" Richard felt no interest whatever in these narratives as stories; but since they referred to escapes they entrancing. The convict who is cast for death thinks of nothing but a reprieve; the "lifer" or the long-termer, thinks of nothing but an escape—and (sometimes) vengeance.
"Well, it was curious. There was a 'Smasher'" (utterer of counterfeit coin) "named Molony in for life there—a thin-shanked, shambling fellow, as Smashers mostly are—mere trash. He had got a file, this fool, and dared not use it—kept it as close as though it were 'bacca,' and waited for his chance, instead of making his chance for himself. Damme, if I had a file!"
Mr. Rolfe's feelings of irritation were almost too much for him; he turned up the whites of his eyes, so that persons who were unacquainted with his views upon religious subjects might have supposed him to be engaged in some devotional exercise.
"Next door to this fellow—though it seemed a long way off, for the cell was in an angle of the prison—there was one of the right sort; name of Jeffreys. No prison in England could have held him if he had had a file. With a rusty nail as he had picked up he dug through his cell wall, and came out one night, all of a sudden, upon the Smasher—thought he was out of doors, poor beggar, through this cursed angle, you see, and after all had only changed his room."
"That must have been the devil," observed Richard.
"It was," said Mr. Rolfe, significantly.
"'Why, how on earth did you do it?' asked the Smasher. At least I suppose he did, for the conversation was not reported, as you shall hear. 'With a mere nail, too. Why, I've got a file, and yet I never thought of that.'
"'A file!' cried Jeffreys. 'Let's look. Give it to me.'
"But Molony wouldn't give it him. The case was this, you see. If Jeffreys could have filed his irons off, and then the window-bars, he could have made a push for it; but he couldn't wait for the other; the night was too far gone for that—there was only time for one to free himself and get away. The Smasher was willing enough to make an effort now; the other's pluck had put a good heart into him. But since he had been there so long, and never moved a hand to help hisself, Jeffreys thought he might stop a little longer; it seemed to him dog-in-the-manger like to be refused the file—at least that's my view of what he thought; though he's been blamed a good deal for what afterward happened."
"But what did happen?"
"Well, they got to high words; the t'other wouldn't give up the file; and when Jeffreys tried to get hold of it, what did the aggravation Smasher do—for you see he was used to bolting half-crowns and such like—but swallow the file!"
"Why, that must have killed him?" observed Yorke.
"So Jeffreys concluded," returned Mr. Rolfe, coolly; "and indeed that was his defense when his trial came on. He pleaded that Molony was dead already. 'I did not put the file down his throat, though I did deprive him of it afterward. I was obliged to do it.' He made an anatomy of him with the nail, in fact, just as the surgeons do with their dissecting-knives, though not so neat, in order to get at the file. An ugly job, I call it; but it was a very pretty case, the lawyers said, as to whether murder had been done or not."
"But did this Jeffreys get off?"
"Upon the trial—yes; but not from the prison. He got into the yard all right, and climbed the wall by making steps of the file and the nail; but, in dropping on the other side, he broke his leg, and so they nabbed him. It's a very hard nut to crack, is Lingmoor, I can tell you."
With these and similar incidents of prison-life, Mr. Rolfe regaled his companion's ears. The sound of this man's voice, muffled as it was, notwithstanding the nature of his talk, was pleasant to Richard after so many months of enforced silence. After long starvation the stomach is thankful for even garbage; and so it is with the mind. Moreover, any thing would have seemed better than to sit and think during that hateful journey. The railway part of it was by far the worst. To be made a show of at the various stations—every one curious to see how convicts looked in their full regimentals, chained and ironed; to behold the other passengers who were free; to see the happy meetings of lovers and friends, of parents and children; and the partings that were scarcely partings at all compared with his own length of exile from all mankind: these were things the bitterness of which Richard felt to the uttermost; his very blood ran gall. His friend Balfour was among his fellow-travelers, but they did not journey in the same van nor railway carriage. Had it been otherwise Richard might have felt some sense of companionship; whereas the contact of this man Rolfe seemed to degrade him to his level, and isolate him from humanity itself. At the same time, he shrank with sensitiveness from the gaze of the gaping crowd. It is so difficult, even with the strongest will to do so, to become callous and hardened to shame except by slow degrees: every finger seemed to point at him in recognition, every tongue to be telling of his disgrace and doom; whereas, in simple fact, his own mother would scarcely have known him in such a garb, and with those iron ornaments about his limbs; his fine hair cropped to the roots; his delicate features worn and sharpened with spare diet and want of sleep; above all, with those haggard eyes, always watching and waiting for something a long way off—almost, indeed, out of sight at present, but coming up, as a ship comes spar by spar above the horizon, taking shape and distinctness as it nears. There were nineteen years and three months still, however, between him and it.