“Indeed!” said Hawes, with a supercilious sneer very hard to bear.
The other would not notice it. “Pray, do not think I side with a refractory prisoner if I beg you, not to countermand, but to modify Robinson's punishment.”
“What for?”
“Because he cannot bear so many hours of the dark cell.”
“Nonsense, sir.”
“Is it too much to ask that you will give him six hours a day for four days instead of twenty-four at a stretch?”
“I don't know whether it is too much for you to ask. I should say by what I see of you that nothing is; but it is too much for me to grant. The man has earned punishment; he has got it, and you have nothing to do with it at all.”
“Yes, I have the care of his soul, and how can I do his soul good if he loses his reason?”
“Stuff! his reason's safe enough, what little he has.”
“Do not say stuff! Do not be rash where the stake is so great, or confident where you have no knowledge. You have never been in the dark cell, Mr. Hawes; I have, and I assure you it tried my nerves to the uttermost. I had many advantages over this poor man. I went in of my own accord, animated by a desire of knowledge, supported by the consciousness of right, my memory enriched by the reading of five-and-twenty years, on which I could draw in the absence of external objects; yet so dreadful was the place that, had I not been fortified by communion with my omnipresent God, I do think my reason would have suffered in that thick darkness and solitude. I repeated thousands of lines of Homer, Virgil and the Greek dramatists; then I came to Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine and Victor Hugo; then I tried to think of a text and compose a sermon; but the minutes seemed hours, leaden hours, and they weighed my head down and my heart down, and so did the Egyptian darkness, till I sought refuge in prayer, and there I found it.”