I paced about the room in the agony of my mind till I sank with exhaustion into a chair. I dug the nails of my fingers into my palms till the blood sprang. Tom in prison! The gentlest, the tenderest, the truest, the most honourable of men charged with a dreadful crime, a hanging crime perhaps, and locked up in jail!
CHAPTER IX
SHE VISITS NEWGATE
It blew almost a hurricane of wind that night. It swept out of the east and stormed in thunder against the house in which we lodged. The rain burst in furious discharges upon the window-panes, and the lightning was sun-bright at times, and the noise of the rushing sea was a continuous artillery which drowned the loud peals from the clouds. All night long I lay awake with wide-open eyes. Thrice my aunt visited my bedside to see how I did and every time I could give her no other answer than that the thought of my sweetheart lying in prison was driving me mad, was killing me; so I would rave. I could think of nothing but Tom. I had no sight for the lightning, no ear for the thunder of the gale, nor for the voice of the sea in its wrath.
It was clear weather next morning. We breakfasted very early, walked to the coach, and quitted Ramsgate at about eight o’clock. It was a dreadful journey to me; endless as the night to one who is shipwrecked and watches for the dawn. The weather had changed too; snow was falling at Canterbury and it was bitterly cold all the way to London. We reached my uncle’s house at ten o’clock that night. My aunt’s letter had been received, and a cheerful fire and a hot, comfortable supper awaited us. My uncle came downstairs to receive us and kissed us both in silence, as though some one dear to us all lay dead upstairs. Exhausted as I was by the long journey, by the cold, by the dreadful sufferings of my mind, I would still insist on hearing of Tom, on learning how he was, how he looked, the meaning of this dreadful thing which had befallen him and me, before I sat or took a bite or stirred a foot to the bedroom to remove my travelling attire. But my uncle was inflexible.
‘Go with your aunt,’ he exclaimed; ‘then return with her here and warm and refresh yourself. I cannot talk rationally with one who looks half dead.’
He forced me to obey, but I made haste to rejoin him. He placed me close to the fire and gave me some hot brandy and water and a biscuit, which he said would act as a stay till supper was served, and, my aunt arriving, he began to talk about Tom.
‘He is charged—did I not write it?—with attempting to scuttle his ship.’
‘Why should he do that?’ I cried.