It Is Never Too Late to Mend Part 47

"And if she takes you for a madman?"

"I shall appeal to the people. Oh! Mr. Hawes, I give you my honor this great question whether or not the law can penetrate a prison shall be sifted to the bottom. Pending my appeals to the Home Office, the sovereign and the people, I have placed a thousand pounds in my solicitor's hands--"

"A thousand pounds! have you, sir? What for, if I am not too curious?"

"For this, sir. Each prisoner whom you have pilloried and starved and a.s.saulted contrary to law shall bring an action of a.s.sault against you the moment he leaves prison. He shall have counsel, and the turnkeys and myself shall be subpoenaed as evidence. When once we get you into court you will find that a prison is the stronghold of law, not a den of lawlessness."

He then turned sharp on the warders.

"I warn you against all your illegal practices. Mr. Hawes's orders shall neither excuse nor protect you. You owe your first obedience to the crown and the law. Here are your powers and your duties; you can all read. Here it is ruled that a prisoner shall receive four visits a day from the governor, chaplain and two turnkeys; these four visits are to keep the man from breaking down under the separate and silent system.

You have all been breaking this rule, but you shall not. I shall report you Evans, you Fry, and you Hodges, and you Mr. Hawes, to the authorities, if after this warning you leave a single prisoner unvisited and unspoken with."

"Have you done preaching, parson?"

"Not quite, jailer."

He tapped the printed paper.

"Here is a distinct order that sick prisoners shall be taken out of their cells into the infirmary, a vast room where they have a much better chance of recovering than in those stinking cells ventilated scientifically, i.e., not ventilated at all. Now there are seven prisoners dangerously ill at this moment; yet you smother these unfortunates in their solitary cells, instead of giving them the infirmary and nurses according to the law. Let these seven persons be in the infirmary before post-time this evening, or to-morrow I report you to the Secretary of State."

With these words he went off leaving them all looking at one another.

"He is coming back again," said Fry.

He did come back again with heightened color and flas.h.i.+ng eyes.

"Here is the prisoners' diet," cried he, tapping the printed rules; "it is settled to an ounce by law, and I see no authority given to the jailer to tamper with it under any circ.u.mstances. Yet I find you perpetually robbing prisoners of their food. Don't let me catch either jailer or turnkeys at this again. Jailers and turnkeys have no more right to steal a prisoner's food than to rob the till of the Bank of England. He receives it defined in bulk and quality from the law's own hand, and the wretch who will rob him of an ounce of it is a felon without a felon's excuse; and as a felon I will proceed against him by the dog-whip of the criminal law, by the gibbet of the public press, and by every weapon that wit and honesty have ever found to scourge cruelty and theft since civilization dawned upon the earth."

He was gone and left them all turned to statues. A righteous man's wrath is far more terrible than the short-lived pa.s.sion of the unprincipled.

It is rarer, and springs from a deeper source than temper. Even Hawes staggered under this mortal defiance so fierce and unexpected. For a moment he regretted having pushed matters so far.

This scene let daylight in upon shallow, earnest Hawes, and showed him a certain shallow error he had fallen into. Because insolence had no earthly effect on the great man's temper he had concluded that nothing could make him boil over. A shade of fear was now added to rage, hatred and a desire for vengeance.

"Fry, come to my house."

Evans had a wife and children, and these hostages to fortune weighed down his manly spirit. He came to Hawes as he was going out and said submissively, though not graciously:

"Very sorry, sir, to think I should disobey you, but when his reverence said it was against the law--"

"That is enough, my man," replied Hawes quietly; "he has bewitched you, it seems. When he is kicked out you will be my servant again, I dare say."

The words and the tone were not ill-humored. It was not Hawes's cue to quarrel with a turnkey.

Evans looked suddenly up, for his mind was relieved by Mr. Hawes's moderation; he looked up and saw a cold, stern eye dwelling on him with a meaning that had nothing to do with the words spoken.

Small natures read one another.

Evans saw his fate inscribed in Hawes's eye.

CHAPTER XVI.

HAWES and Fry sat in council. A copy of the prison rules was before them, and the more they looked at them after Mr. Eden's interpretation, the less they liked them: they were severe and simple; stringent against the prisoners on certain points; stringent in their favor on others.

"The sick-list must go to the infirmary, I believe," said Hawes, thoughtfully. "He'd beat us there. The justices will support me on every other point, because they must contradict themselves else. I'll have that fellow out of the jail, Fry, before a month is out, and meantime what can I do to be revenged on him?"

"Punish 'em all the more," suggested the simple-minded Fry.

"No, that won't do; better keep a little quiet now till he is out of the jail. Fine it would look if he was really to bribe these vermin to bring actions against me, and subpoena himself and that sneaking dog, Evans."

"Well, sir, but if you turn him out he will do it all the more."

"You fool, can't you see the difference? If he comes into court a servant of the crown every lie he tells will go for gospel. But if he comes a disgraced servant, cas.h.i.+ered for refractory conduct, why then we could tell the jury it is all his spite at being turned off."

"You know a thing or two, sir," whined the doleful Fry.

Hawes pa.s.sed him a fresh tumbler of grog, and pondered deeply and anxiously. But suddenly an idea flashed on him that extinguished his other meditations. "Give me the rules." He ran his eye rapidly over them. "Why, no! of course not, what a fool I was not to see that half an hour ago."

"What is it, sir?"

"Finish your grog first, and then I have a job for you." He sat down and wrote two lines on a slip of paper.

"Have you done?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then take this order."

"Yes, sir."

"And the printed rules in your hand--here, take 'em."

"Yes, sir."

"And take Hodges and Evans with you, and tell me every word that sneaking dog, Evans, says and everything he does."

"Yes, sir. But what are we all three to do?"

"Execute this order!"

An ebullition of wrath was as rare with Mr. Eden as an eruption of Vesuvius. His deep-rooted indignation against cruelty remained; it was a part of his nature. But his ruffled feathers smoothed themselves the moment little Hawes & Co. were out of his eye. He even said to himself, "What is the matter with me? one moment so despondent, the next irascible. I hardly know myself. I must take a little of my antidote."

So saying he proceeded to visit some of those cells into which he had introduced rational labor (anti-theft he called it). Here he found cheerful looks as well as busy hands. Here industry was relished with a gusto inconceivable to those who have never stagnated body and soul in enforced solitude and silence. Here for the time at least were honest converts to anti-theft. He had seen them dull and stupid, brutalized, drifting like inanimate bodies on the heavy waters of the Dead Sea. He had drawn them ash.o.r.e and put life into them. He had taught their glazed eyes to sparkle with the stimulus of rational and interesting work, and those same eyes rewarded him by beaming on him with pleasure and grat.i.tude whenever he came. This soothed and cheered his weary spirit vexed by the wickedness and stupidity that surrounded him and obstructed the good work.

His female artisans gave him a keen pleasure, for here he benefited a s.e.x as well as a prisoner. He had long been saying that women are as capable as men of a mult.i.tude of handicrafts, from which they are excluded by man's jealousy and grandmamma's imbecility. And this wise man hoped to raise a few Englishwomen to the industrial level of Frenchwomen and Englishmen; not by writing and prattling that the s.e.x are at present men's equals in intelligence and energy, which is a stupid falsehood calculated to keep them forever our inferiors by persuading them they need climb no higher than they have climbed.

His line was very different. "At present you are infinitely man's inferior in various energy," said he. "Dependents are inferiors throughout the world."

If they were not so at first starting such a relation would make them so in two months.