So ran our talk. It was all about Tom. As on the previous evening so now again I kept my kind-hearted uncle up till past midnight with my feverish questions. My aunt had asked me to sleep in their house, and I gladly consented, partly that I might be instantly ready to accompany my uncle to Newgate at the appointed time, and partly because I dreaded the loneliness of my home, the long and dismal solitude of the evening and the night in a scene crowded with memories of my father and my mother and my sweetheart, of my childhood, of the sunny hours of my holiday rambling and of careless merry days of independence. I could not sleep, through thinking of the morrow’s meeting. It was seven months since Tom and I had kissed and parted. He had sailed away full of hope. He had written in high spirits. And now he was a prisoner in Newgate; his ship taken from him; the prospects of the voyage ruined; his innocent, manly heart infamously shamed and degraded, charged with a crime which might banish him for ever from England!
‘Do not be shocked,’ said my uncle, in the morning, ‘because you will not be suffered to speak to him face to face. You will presently see what I mean. It is mere prison routine—a quite necessary discipline. There’s nothing in it.’
After all these years I but vaguely remember as much of this horrible jail as we traversed. My heart beat with a pulse of fever; my sight fell dim in the gloom after the whiteness of the day outside. I seemed to see nothing, but I looked always for my sweetheart as we advanced. I recollect little more than the door of Newgate jail, with its flanking of huge, black, fortress-like wall, the iron-grated windows, the heavy, open doors faced with iron, the dark passages, in one of which hung an oil lamp, and the strange sight beyond this gloomy passage of stone floor touched with barred sunlight flowing through an iron grating. Many structural changes have been made in the interior of Newgate since those days. We entered a passage walled on either hand by gratings and wirework. Some warders in high hats and blue coats—warders or constables, I know not which—stood outside this passage. My uncle was at my side, and we waited for my sweetheart to appear. There was but one prisoner then present. He was conversing through the grating with a dark-skinned, black-eyed woman of about forty, immensely stout and dressed in many bright colours. He was clothed in the garb of the felon, and was enormously thick-set and powerfully built; you saw the muscles of his arms tighten the sleeves of his jacket as he gesticulated with Hebraic demonstrativeness to the woman whose voice was as harsh as a parrot’s. His hair was cropped close; where his whiskers and beard were shaved his skin was a dark coarse blue; he was deeply pitted with small-pox; his nose lay somewhat flat upon his face with very thick nostrils; his brows were black and heavily thatched, and the eyes they protected were coal black as the Indian’s, but amazingly darting. My uncle looked at him with interest, and whispered:
‘I was at that man’s trial. He was sentenced to the hulks and to transportation for life for receiving stolen goods and keeping a notorious house. He is a Jew prize-fighter, and one of the very best that ever stood up in a ring. Three years ago he beat the Scotch champion Sandy Toomer into pulp. He’s a terrible ruffian, and a villain of the deepest dye, but a noble prize-fighter, and I am sorry for Barney Abram.’
The felon took no notice of us spite of my uncle staring at him, as though he had been one of the greatest of living men. I glanced at the horrid creature, but thought only of Tom.
I was glad of the delay in his coming. I had time to collect myself and to force an expression of calmness into my face. On a sudden he appeared! He came in by the side of a warder from the direction of a yard, in which my uncle afterwards told me prisoners who had not yet had their trials took the air. He was dressed in his own clothes, in seafaring apparel somewhat soiled by wear. I had feared to see him in the vile attire of a convict, and was spared a dreadful shock, when I looked and beheld my dear one as I remembered him! But oh! not as I remembered him! He had let his beard grow; he was shaggy and scarce recognisable with it, and his hair was longer than formerly. His cheeks were sunk, his eyes dull, like the eyes of one who has not slept for weeks, his lips pale, his complexion strange and hardly describable, owing to the pallor that had sifted through, so to speak, and mottled the sun-brown of his skin. But his old beauty was there to my love; my heart gave a great leap when I saw him; and I cried his name and extended my arms against the wire of the grating.
He looked at me steadfastly for some moments with his teeth hard set upon his under lip, as though he dared not attempt to speak until he had conquered his emotion and mastered such tears as burn like fire in the brain of a man. My uncle gently saluted him through the bars, and then motioned with his hand, and, taking me by the arm, led me down to the extremity of this jail meeting-place, and Tom walked on the opposite side until he was abreast. My uncle then moved some distance away and stood watching the Jew prize-fighter. A warder walked leisurely to and fro; and others at a little distance stood like sentinels.
My sweetheart’s first words were:
‘Marian, before God I am innocent.’
‘Tom, I know it—I know it, dearest, and your innocence shall be proved.’