Again, he was a man of the strongest and tenderest affections. What keen mental anguish must he have experienced at the thought of his beloved wife threading alone the hot, crowded streets, hourly exposed to the insults of rude Burman officials; day by day bringing or sending food to the jail; assuaging the wretchedness of the prisoners by bribing their keepers; pleading for the release of her husband with one Burman officer after another, and with such pathetic eloquence that on one occasion she melted to tears even the old governor of the prison; giving birth to her babe during a confinement of only twenty days; carrying her little Maria all the way in her arms to that “never-to-be-forgotten place,” Oung-pen-la, her only conveyance a rough cart, the violent motion of which, together with the dreadful heat and dust, made her almost distracted; nursing her infant and the little native girls under her care through a course of small-pox; and at last, broken down herself, and brought to death’s door by the same loathsome disease, succeeded by the dread spotted fever.
Add to these horrors of Mr. Judson’s imprisonment the daily and even hourly anticipation of torture and death, and it will be difficult to conceive of a denser cloud of miseries than that which settled down on his devoted head. The prisoners knew that they were arrested as spies. The Burman king and his generals were exasperated by the rapid and unexpected successes of the English army, and Mr. Judson and his fellow-prisoners had every reason to suppose that this pent-up fury would be poured upon their heads. It was customary to question the prisoner with instruments of torture—the cord and the iron mallet. Rumors of a frightful doom were constantly sounding in their ears. Now they heard their keepers during the night sharpening the knives to decapitate the prisoners the next morning; now the roar of their mysterious fellow-prisoner, a huge, starving lioness, convinced them that they were to be executed by being thrown into her cage; now it was reported that they were to be burned up together with their prison as a sacrifice; now that they were to be buried alive at the head of the Burman army in order to insure its victory over the English. The following description by Mr. Gouger of the solemn hour of three, shows the exquisite mental torture to which the prisoners were subjected:
“Within the walls nothing worthy of notice occurred until the hour of three in the afternoon. As this hour approached, we noticed that the talking and jesting of the community gradually died away; all seemed to be under the influence of some powerful restraint, until that fatal hour was announced by the deep tones of a powerful gong suspended in the palace-yard, and a death-like silence prevailed. If a word was spoken it was in a whisper. It seemed as though even breathing were suspended under the control of a panic terror, too deep for expression, which pervaded every bosom. We did not long remain in ignorance of the cause. If any of the prisoners were to suffer death that day, the hour of three was that at which they were taken out for execution. The very manner of it was the acme of cold-blooded cruelty. The hour was scarcely tolled by the gong when the wicket opened, and the hideous figure of a spotted man appeared, who, without uttering a word, walked straight to his victim, now for the first time probably made acquainted with his doom. As many of these unfortunate people knew no more than ourselves the fate that awaited them, this mystery was terrible and agonizing; each one fearing, up to the last moment, that the stride of the spot might be directed his way. When the culprit disappeared with his conductor, and the prison door closed behind them, those who remained began again to breathe more freely; for another day, at least, their lives were safe.
“I have described this process just as I saw it practiced. On this first day, two men were thus led away in total silence; not a useless question was asked by the one party, nor explanation given by the other; all was too well understood. After this inhuman custom was made known to us, we could not but participate with the rest in their diurnal misgivings, and shudder at the sound of the gong and the apparition of the pahquet. It was a solemn daily lesson of an impressive character, ‘Be ye also ready.’”
It is no wonder that Mr. Judson in the midst of these horrors took refuge in the quietism of Madame Guyon, and used often to murmur her beautiful lines:
“No place I seek, but to fulfil
In life, and death, Thy lovely will;
No succor in my woes I want,
Except what Thou art pleased to grant.
Our days are numbered—let us spare