“No! it would not be well to do so. Through the agency of some unknown friend, a writ of habeas corpus has been obtained, and your father has been removed from Whitecross Street to the Queen’s Prison—all of which you do not understand. However, there he is, and the place is one of which you can have no conception. The assemblage there is large, mixed, and not scrupulous in its behaviour. You would be bewildered without some one to make inquiries for you, and be, perhaps, rudely assailed by the unreflecting or the callous and the impertinent. Yes; Hal shall go with you, and you will, believe me, find the prison somewhat different to the picture you have sketched in your imagination.”
Flora listened in silence, and acquiesced in the arrangement, not that the disagreeable part of it would be the society of Hal—nay, she would have gone with Jukes rather than not have gone at all, malicious ogre as she considered him—but she would have preferred to have gone alone.
She felt an intuitive reluctance that Hal, whom she so much esteemed, and whom, therefore, she would have wished to have seen her relatives in their best light, should visit her father in a prison, and that the visit should be paid with her.
But inexorable circumstances compelling, she set out with him, her small hand resting upon his arm, and making him feel a far wealthier and happier potentate than any monarch that ever reigned upon earth.
CHAPTER VIII.—THE PRISON.
There’s a divinity doth shape our ends,
Rough hew them how we will.
—Hamlet.
When they together reached the lodge, or gate, as it is called, of the Queen’s Prison, Hal and Flora gazed with surprise on the motley group waiting for the door to be unlocked, that they might enter to see those confined within.
A sallow faced, black-haired turnkey, who seemed all eyes, was what is called “on the lock,” and he “took stock” of every individual about to pass into the prison with a sharp scrutiny, and with a rapidity which told that this had been for years his daily practice.