“Think of the doing we’ve had this night!”
“I heard,” the girl answered. And an involuntary shudder escaped her. “It was dreadful! dreadful!”
“You’d ha’ thought so,” ungraciously, “if you had had to deal with the lad yourself! Never was such a Jack o’ Bedlam! I wonder all our heads aren’t broke.”
“Is he often like that?” Henrietta asked.
For she had lain awake many hours of the night, trembling and trying to close her ears against the ravings of a madman; who was confined in the next yard, and who had suffered an access of mania during the night. The prisons of that day served also for madhouses.
“No, but once in the month or so,” the jailor’s wife answered. “And often enough, drat him! Doctor says he’ll go off in one of these Bedlam fits, and the sooner the better, I say! But I’m wasting my time and catching my death, gossipping with you! Anyway, don’t you complain, young woman,” severely. “There’s worse off than you!” And she clattered abruptly away, and Henrietta was left to patten her road to the pump and back, and afterwards to finish her toilette in what shivering comfort she might.
For a prisoner, she might not have much of which to complain. But though that was not the day of bedroom fires, or rubber water-bottles, and luxury stopped at the warming-pan, or the heated brick, there are degrees of misery, and this degree was new to her.
However, the woman was better than her word, for in a short time her child appeared, painfully bearing at arm’s length a shovelful of live embers. And the fire put a new face on things. Breakfast sent in from outside followed, and was drawn out to the utmost for the sake of the employment which it afforded. For time hung heavy on the girl’s hands. She had long exhausted the Kendal Chronicle; and a volume of “Sermons for Persons under Sentence of Death”—the property of the gaol—she had steadfastly refused. Other reading there was none, and she was rather gratified than troubled when she espied a thin trickle of water stealing under the door. The snow in the yard was melting; and it was soon made plain to her that if she did not wish to be flooded she must act for herself.
The task was not very congenial to a girl gently bred, and who had all her life associated such work with Doll and a mop. But on her first entrance into the gaol she had resolved to do, as the lesser of two evils, whatever she should be told to do. And the thing might have been worse, for there was no one to see her at work. She kilted up her skirt and donned the pattens, put on her hood, and taking a broom from the corner of the yard began to sweep vigorously, first removing the snow from the flags before her door, and then, as the space she had cleared grew wider, gathering the snow into a heap at the lower end of the yard.
She was soon warm and in the full enjoyment of action. But in no long time, as was natural, she tired, and paused to rest and look about her, supporting herself by the broom-handle. A robin alighted on a spike on the top of the wall, and flirting its tail, eyed her in a friendly way, with its head on one side. Then it flew away—it could fly away! And at the thought,