On the women's side of the prison, Elizabeth Fry was already bringing order into disorder, light into the midst of darkness; but, on the men's side, misrule still ruled supreme.
The old prisoners levied a kind of blackmail on the others; they sold food, they winked at evil practices, they passed in tobacco and snuff, and, as wardsmen, their power was despotic.
In their hands was the placing of new arrivals, in their hands the drawing of briefs; they, practically, could feed or starve, bind or unbind; and one of the first things Barnabas did was to protest against the orders of a wardsman!
To do him justice, the preacher, though he had lamentably small sense of the expedient, was not naturally quarrelsome, and had rubbed shoulders against too many strange bedfellows to be over fastidious.
The crowded room in which the men slept together anyhow, under filthy mats on the floor, shocked him much less than it would shock any respectable member of society now-a-days. He relinquished his share of the rug, a third share; and stretched himself on the floor, as near to the window as he could get.
Everything was dirty; the men, the floor, and, not least, the conversation! Barnabas was glad that there was no glass in the windows, though not much fresh air seemed to make its way in anyhow. He had a great capability for abstracting himself from what was going on around him, and had been in bad places before,—though none, he was constrained to allow to himself, quite so bad as this. But when the key turned in the lock, shutting in for the night all these offscourings of the London streets; then, indeed, began a scene of mad drunken riot, of iniquity and cruelty, that pierced through his abstraction and forced him to attend.
He sat up in his corner, looking on with eyes that grew eager with desire to lift his testimony against the gambling and drinking and blasphemy that seemed to challenge him; but even he hesitated.
He was disheartened and sickened; he felt his faith low, his power to speak wanting. A sense of the certainty of failure, for once, deterred him; the strong impulse that carried other hearts was not present (possibly because he was physically tired, though this was a reason which would never have occurred to him), and he held his peace.
Of fear, in the sense of dread of personal harm to himself, he had little by nature and less by practice; but a deep moral depression and humility that underlay his boldness, and was less paradoxical than it at first seemed, sometimes closed his lips.
When the "spirit moved him," he would speak, nothing doubting; but, at times, he would sit in mental sackcloth, with no consciousness of Divine inspiration.