Kit, watching them with shuddering heart, recalled that passage in his mother's favourite Sunday book where Christian, at the mouth of Hell, heard a company of fiends coming to meet him.
He found himself envying Christian. An honest fiend was an honest fiend; but these were men! It was their humanity, the sense of his kinship with them, that seemed to make his heart collapse.
And their names!
Toadie, the squat brute, with the front teeth; Whitey, the albino, peering and prying; One-eye, Humpy, Bandy and the rest—all labelled like dogs from some physical deformity.
Once and for all they slew in the boy's mind the Romance of Crime. Now he understood what the old Book meant about the Wages of Sin. Death indeed; death in life. He read it in their faces. Yes; it was all true. These men had done evil, and they had come forth unto the Resurrection of Damnation.
And not so very long ago he had wished to be one such!—a highwayman, a smuggler, a gentlemanly villain of some sort, very devil-may-care and gallant, robbing the rich, helping the poor, waving a scented handkerchief to the ladies as he rode to Tyburn, debonair to the last.
Now he was face to face with criminals in real life. And what was their distinguishing feature?—Filth.
They had not shaved for days, nor washed for years. The stink of them blew off the clean sea towards him. It seemed to his imagination that the water curdled with disgust as the brutes slushed through it.
A phrase of his laughing mother's occurred to him—no soap, no soul. True too.
He would have given all he had for a look at one clean-fleshed, clear- eyed Englishman, smelling of earth and honest tobacco.