They left. On the way to the workshops, they had a glimpse of the old parts of the prison, used during the Napoleonic wars, incredibly dark, frowsy, like catacombs.
"We don't use this part--unless we're very full up," said the official, and he contrasted it with the bright, spacious, healthy excellences of the hall which they had just quitted, to prove that civilisation never stood still.
And then suddenly, at the end of a passage, a door opened and they were in the tailors' shop, a large irregular apartment full of a strong stench and of squatted and grotesque human beings. The human beings, for the most part, were clothed in a peculiar brown stuff, covered with broad arrows. The dress consisted of a short jacket, baggy knickerbockers, black stockings, and coloured shoes. Their hair was cut so short that they had the appearance of being bald, and their great ears protruded at a startling angle from the sides of those smooth heads. They were of every age, yet they all looked alike, ridiculous, pantomimic, appalling. Some gazed with indifference at the visitors; others seemed oblivious of the entry. They all stitched on their haunches, in the stench, under the surveillance of eight armed warders in blue.
"How many?" asked the official mechanically.
"Forty-nine, sir," said a warder.
And Hilda searched their loathsome and vapid faces for the face of George Cannon. He was not there. She trembled,--whether with relief or with disappointment she knew not. She was agonised, but in her torture she exulted that she had come.
No comment had been made in the workshop, the official having hinted that silence was usual on such occasions. But in a kind of antechamber--one of those amorphous spaces, serving no purpose and resembling nothing, which are sometimes to be found between definable rooms and corridors in a vast building imperfectly planned--the party halted in the midst of a discussion as to discipline. The male visitors, except Edwin, showed marked intelligence and detachment; they seemed to understand immediately how it was that forty-nine ruffians could be trusted to squat on their thighs and stitch industriously and use scissors and other weapons for hours without being chained to the ground; they certainly knew something of the handling of men. The official, triumphant, stated that every prisoner had the right of personal appeal to the Governor every day.
"They come with their stories of grievances," said he, tolerant and derisive.
"Which often aren't true?"
"Which are never true," said the official quietly. "Never! They are always lies--always! ... Shows the material we have to deal with!" He gave a short laugh.