“Hold your [oath] noise!” Hawes shrunk with disgust from noise in his prison, and could not comprehend why the prisoners could not take their punishments without infringing upon the great and glorious silence of which the jail was the temple and he the high priest. “The beggars get no good by kicking up a row,” argued he.
“Hold your noise!—take him to his cell!”
Whether it was because he had desecrated the temple with noise, or from the accident of having attracted the governor's attention, the weight of the system fell on this small object now.
Gillies was ordered to make a fabulous number of crank revolutions—fabulous, at least, in connection with his tender age; he was put on the lightest crank, but the lightest was heavy to thirteen years. Not being the infant Hercules, he could not perform this labor; so Hawes put him in jacket and collar almost the whole day. His young and supple frame was in his favor, but once or twice he could hardly help shamming, and then they threw half a bucket over him.
The next day he was put on the crank, and not being able to complete the task that was set him before dinner, he was strapped up until the evening. The next day the governor tried another tack. He took away his meat soup and gruel, and gave him nothing but bread and water. Strange to say, this change of diet did not supply the deficiency; he could not do the infant Hercules his work even on bread and water. Then the governor deprived the obstinate little dog of his chapel. “If you won't work, I'm [participle] if you shall pray.” The boy missed the recreation of hearing Mr. Jones hum the Liturgy; missed it in a way you cannot conceive. Your soporific was his excitement; think of that.
Little Gillies became sadly dispirited, and weaker at the crank than before; ergo, the governor sentenced him to be fourteen days without bed or gas.
But when they took away his bed and did not light his gas little Gillies began to lose his temper; he made a great row about this last stroke of discipline. “I won't live such a life as this,” said little Gillies, in a pet. “Why don't the governor hang me at once?”
“What is that noise?” roared the governor, who was in the corridor and had long ears.
“It is No. 50 kicking up a row at having his bed and gas taken,” replied a turnkey, with a note of admiration in his voice.
The governor bounced into the cell. “Are you grumbling at that, you rebellious young rascal? you forget there are a dozen lashes owing you yet.” Now the boy had not forgotten, but he hoped the governor had. “Well, you shall have the rest to-morrow.”
With these words ringing in his ears, little Gillies was locked up for the night at six o'clock. His companions darkness and unrest-for a prisoner's bed is the most comfortable thing he has, and the change from it to a stone floor is as great to him as it would be to us—darkness and unrest, and the cat waiting to spring on him at peep of day. Quae cum ita erant, as the warder put the key into his cell the next morning he heard a strange gurgling; he opened the door quickly, and there was little Gillies hanging; a chair was near him on which he had got to suspend himself by his handkerchief from the window; he was black in the face, but struggling violently, and had one hand above his head convulsively clutching the handkerchief. Fry lifted him up by the knees and with some difficulty loosed the handkerchief.
Little Gillies, as soon as his throat could vent a sound, roared with fright at the recent peril, and then cried a bit, finally expressed a hope his breakfast would not be taken from him for this act of insubordination.
This infraction of discipline was immediately reported to the governor.
“Little brute,” cried Hawes, viciously, “I'll work him!”
“Oh! he knew I was at hand, sir,” said Fry, “or he would not have tried it.”
“Of course he would not; I remember last night he was grumbling at his bed being taken away. I'll serve him out!”
Soon after this the governor met the chaplain and told him the case. “He shall make you an apology”—imperative mood him.
“Me, an apology!”
“Of course—you are the officer that has the care of his soul and he shall apologize to you for making away with it or trying it on.”
This resolution was conveyed to Gillies with fearful threats, so when the chaplain visited him he had got his lesson pat.
“I beg your reverence's pardon for hanging myself,” began he at sight, rather loud and as bold as brass.
“Beg the Almighty's pardon, not mine.”
“No! the governor said it was yours I was to beg,” demurred Gillies.
“Very well. But you should beg God's pardon more than mine.”
“For why, sir?”
“For attempting your life, which was His gift.”
“Oh! I needn't beg His pardon; He doesn't care what becomes of me; if He did He wouldn't let them bully me as they do day after day, drat 'em.”
“I am sorry to see one so young as you so hardened. I dare say the discipline of the jail is bitter to you, it is to all idle boys; but you might be in a much worse place—and will if you do not mend.”
“A worse place than this, your reverence! Oh, my eye!”
“And you ought to be thankful to Heaven for sending the turnkey at that moment (here I'm sorry to say little Gillies grinned satirically), or you would be in a worse place. Would you rather be here or in hell?” half asked, half explained the reverend gentleman in the superior tone of one closing a discussion forever.
“In hell!!!” replied Gillies, opening his eyes with astonishment at the doubt.
Mr. Jones was dumfounded; of all the mischances that befall us in argument this coup perplexes us most. He looked down at the little ignorant wretch, and decided it would be useless to waste theology on him. He fell instead into familiar conversation with him, and then Gillies, with the natural communicativeness of youth, confessed to him “that he had heard the warder at the next cell before he ventured to step off the chair and suspend himself.”
“Well! but you ran a great risk, too. Suppose he had not come into your cell—suppose he had been called away for a minute.”
“I should have been scragged, and no mistake,” said the boy, with a shiver. Throttling had proved no joke. “But I took my chance of that,” added Gillies. “I was determined to give them a fright; besides, if he hadn't come, it would all be over by now, sir, and all the better for me, I know.”
Further communication was closed by the crank, which demanded young Hopeful by its mouthpiece, Fry. After dinner, to his infinite disgust, he received the other moiety of his flogging; but by a sort of sulky compensation his bed was kicked into his cell again at night by Fry acting under the governor's orders.
“That was not a bad move, hanging myself a little—a very little,” said the young prig. He hooked up his recovered treasure; and, though smarting all over, coiled himself up in it, and in three minutes forgot present pain, past dangers and troubles to come.
The plan pursued with Robinson was to keep him at low-water mark by lowering his diet; without this, so great was his natural energy and disposition to work, that no crank excuse could have been got for punishing him, and at this period he was too wise and self-restrained to give any other. But after a few days of unjust torture he began to lose hope; and with hope patience oozed away too, and his enemy saw with grim satisfaction wild flashes of mad rage come every now and then to his eye, harder and harder to suppress. “He will break out before long,” said Hawes to himself, “and then—”
Robinson saw the game, and a deep dark hatred of his enemy fought on the side of his prudence. This bitter raging struggle of contending passions in the thief's heart harmed his soul more than had years of burglary and petty larceny. All the vices of the old jail system are nothing compared with the diabolical effect of solitude on a heart smarting with