Stranica 272 [272]
OCR
208 not have about him the means of anticipating the law ; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of the condemned cells, and left him there—alone. the door, which served for seat and bedstead, and casting his bloodshot eyes upon the ground, tried to collect his thoughts. disjointed fragments of what the judge had said, though it had seemed to him at the time that he could not hear a word. These gradually fell into their proper places, and, by degrees, suggested more, almost as it was delivered. To be hanged by the neck till he was dead — that was the end. To be hanged by the neck till he was dead. As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had known who had died upon the scaflold—some of them through his means. They rose up in such quick succession that he could hardly count them. He had seen some of them die—and joked too, because they died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop went down ; and how suddenly they changed from strong and vigorous men to dangling heaps of clothes! Some of them might have inhabited that very cell—sat upon that very spot. It was very dark; why did’nt they bring a light? The cell had been built for many years—scores of men must have passed their last hours there—it was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead bodies —the cap, the noose,—the pinioned arms —the faces that he knew even beneath that hideous veil—Light, light! At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy door and walls, two men appeared, one bearing a candle which he thrust into an iron candlestick fixed against the wall, and the other dragging in a mattress on which to pass the night; for the prisoner was to be left alone no more. Then came night—dark, dismal, silent night. Other wretches are glad to hear the church-clocks strike, for they tell of life and coming day. To the Jew they brought despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden with the one deep hollow sound —death. What availed the noise and bust.e of cheerful morning, which penetrated even there, to him? It was another fortu of knell, with mockery added to che warning. The day passed off—day, there was no day; it was gone as soon as come —and night came on again; night so long, and yet so short; long in its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours. One time he raved and blasphemed, and at another howled and tore his hair. Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts, and he beat them off. Saturday night! he had only one night more to live. And as he thought of this, the day broke—Sunday. It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive hopes of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than the dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of the two men who relieved each other in their attendance upon him, and they, for their parts, made no effort to rouse his attention. He had sat there awake, but dreaming. Now he started up every minute, and with gasping mouth and burning skin hurried to and fro in such a paroxysm of fear and wrath that even they—used to such sights—recoiled from him with horror. He grew so terrible at last in all the tortures of his evil conscience, that one man could not bear to sit there, eyeing him alone, and so the two kept watch together. He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn and twisted into knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light ; his unwashed flesh crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight—nine— ten. If it was not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on each others’ heels, where would he be when they came round again! Eleven. Another struck ere the voice of the hour before had ceased to vibrate. At eight he would be the only mourner in his own Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and such unspeakable anguish—not only from the eyes, but too often and too long from the thoughts of men, never held so dread a spectacle as that. The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man was doing who was to be hanged to-morrow, would have slept but il] that night, if they could have seen him then.
