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.
‘To defraud the insurance offices. I told him at the time that he
erred by over-insuring, but it seems that he went further even than he
admitted, for he put a venture of cargo of his own into the vessel and
insured the goods and the freight in the Neptune. Four offices!’ he
exclaimed, and he broke off, looking down with a very grave face.
‘Where is he?’ I cried.
‘In Newgate,’ he answered.
‘Oh, don’t tell me that!’ I shrieked, clasping my hands and rocking
myself.
My aunt stared with a white face at her husband.
‘Now, Marian,’ said my uncle, ‘if you possess one particle of the
spirit of your father, let it animate and support you now--now, and
until this tragic affair is at an end. Screams and lamentations are
not going to help Captain Butler. He says that he is the victim of a
diabolical conspiracy. I believe it, and it will be our duty to prove
it. What is there about Newgate more than there is about Millbank or
the Hulks or Horsemonger Lane to horrify you?’
‘Why is he in Newgate?’ asked my aunt.
‘He was charged, yesterday, at Bow Street, and committed to take his
trial at the Central Criminal Court. That’s why. There is nothing in
it. Many innocent men have been locked up in Newgate.’
‘Who charges him with this crime?’ said I.
‘His mate, a man of the name of Rotch, and a carpenter, a drunken
rascal, of the name of Nodder.’
And then he related the story of the accusation, and described what had
passed at Bow Street on the preceding day.
Supper was served, and the presence of the servant held us silent.
I could not look at the food I was helped to, and was passionately
craving for the servant to be gone that I might question my uncle.
Then, when the opportunity came, I said to him:
‘Is scuttling a ship a serious crime?’
‘One of the most serious.’
I trembled and said:
‘What is the punishment for it?’
He was silent, as though he did not or would not hear. I sprang up and
shrieked out:
‘Uncle, is it hanging?’
‘It would have been hanging two or three years ago,’ said he. ‘Thank
God, it is no longer a capital crime.’
‘What can they do to Tom?’ I cried.
‘Control yourself, my dear child,’ said my aunt.
‘Oh, uncle, what can they do to him?’ I cried again.
‘They must first prove him guilty.’
‘And then--and then?’
‘The penalty is transportation.’
‘He may be sent out of the country?’
‘Yes, to Norfolk Island or Tasmania or Botany Bay,’ answered my uncle,
in a voice sullen with his sympathy with my misery.
‘For how long?’
‘You’ll drive yourself mad with these questions,’ said my aunt. ‘He is
not yet convicted.’
‘For how long, uncle?’
‘For a term--perhaps for life. But he is innocent, and we must prove
him so.’
I flung myself into an arm-chair and buried my face. Yet I could
not weep; I had cried away all my tears. But, oh, the torment in my
half-strangled throat, and the anguish of my dry, heart-breaking sobs!
After a while, I succeeded in forcing a sort of composure upon myself.
We sat talking until long past midnight. I asked many questions as
rationally and as collectedly as I could; but I remarked, with secret
horror, in my uncle’s speech a note of misgiving that sank into my
spirits like a knife into the heart. Indeed, it seemed more than
misgiving, even dark suspicion in him. He said not a word to justify
what I felt; but he talked of four to one, and again he talked of Tom’s
exaggerated precaution in excessively insuring his venture, and I
guessed what was in his mind.
‘We shall be able to score one good point,’ said he. ‘The mate
Rotch, some five or six years ago, quarrelled with your sweetheart
Tom, at Valparaiso. Butler was then mate of a ship. They met at a
fandango. Rotch insulted a young lady Butler had been dancing with
and had previously known. Your sweetheart took him by the throat and
backed him out of the room, half suffocated and black in the face.
Strangely enough, two years later, Butler found himself master of a
small Indiaman, called the _Chanticleer_, with this same man Rotch as
second mate under him. The mate of the _Chanticleer_ complained much
of Rotch’s insolence. One night, when in Soundings, homeward bound,
Butler found Rotch sleeping in his watch, with a dozen ships looming
dark all round. This was extraordinary. Butler reported his conduct to
the owners of the _Chanticleer_, and the man lost his berth. But on
your sweetheart learning that Rotch had been married shortly before
sailing, and that a child had been born to him during his absence at
sea, he went to work to procure his reinstatement or to obtain another
situation for him, and was successful. There may be other motives; but
here is a point that must go far to confirm Butler’s declaration that
he is the victim of a conspiracy.’
I listened greedily. I kept my eyes, smarting and burning, fastened
upon my uncle’s face.
‘What is scuttling a ship?’ I asked.
‘Did I not explain? It is boring a hole in her so that she may sink.’
‘Who says that Tom bored a hole in his ship?’
‘Rotch and Nodder and two seamen.’
‘Did they see him bore the hole?’
‘They affirm that they saw the holes which he had bored, and discovered
a tree-nail auger in his cabin.’
‘Oh, he would not do it!’ I cried. ‘It is a lie! He is innocent!’
Here my aunt advised me to go to bed, and said that she herself could
sit up no longer. But I detained my uncle for another half hour with
many feverish, impassioned questions, before I could force myself from
the room, and a church bell struck one through the stillness of the
snowing night as I went to the bedroom that had been prepared for me.
My uncle was to see Tom next morning at Newgate, and told me he would
inquire the rules and bring about a meeting between my sweetheart and
me as speedily as possible. After breakfast, my box was put into a
coach, and I drove to my house in Stepney. Mr. Stanford came into the
hall to speak to me. I forced a wild smile and a hurried bow and pushed
past. I could not address him nor listen to what he had to say. When
I went upstairs and sat down in my own room, the room in which Tom
and Will had dined with me, where I had passed hours in sweet musings
upon my lover, where there were many little things he had given me--a
picture I had admired, a screen, a little French chimney clock, above
all, his miniature--I believed my heart was breaking. I wept and wept;
I could not stay my tears. My maid stood beside me, caressed and tried
to control me, then drew off and stood looking at me, afraid.
By-and-by I rallied, and since activity was life to me--for sitting
still and thinking were heart-breaking and soul-withering to one
situated as I was, without a father or a mother to carry her grief to,
without an intimate friend to open herself to--I considered what I
should do; and then I reflected that all the money which I could scrape
together might be needful for Tom’s defence. Thereupon I went straight
to the bank into which my trustees paid my money, and ascertained
how my account stood. I saw the manager of the bank and asked him to
what amount he would allow me to overdraw, should the need arise, and
he told me that I was at liberty to overdraw to a considerable sum
against the security of the title-deeds of my house, which were in his
possession, and which had been originally lodged at the bank by my
father.
This and other errands I went upon helped to kill the day, and the
distraction did me a little good. In the afternoon, before it was
dusk, I walked as far as Ludgate Hill, and turned into the Old Bailey,
and went a little distance up Newgate Street, and continued walking
there that I might be near Tom. I crossed the street and looked at the
horrible walls, dark with the grime of London, and at the spiked gates,
and at a huddle of miserable, tattered wretches at one of those gates,
as though they yearned in their starvation and misery for the prison
food and the shelter of the cells within; and I wondered in what part
behind those fortress-like walls my sweetheart was, what his thoughts
were, what he was doing, if he was thinking of me as I was of him,
until I stamped the pavement in a sudden agony of mind, and crossed the
street to the walls, and went along the pavement close beside them, to
and fro, to and fro.
The dusk drove me away at last, and being very weary, I called a coach
and went to my aunt’s, that I might get the latest news of Tom. My
uncle had had a long interview with my sweetheart in the morning.
‘He is fairly cheerful and hopeful,’ said he. ‘You will scarcely know
him, though. His anxiety during the long voyage home in the man-of-war
has pinched and wrinkled and shrunk him. You’ll see him to-morrow. We
will go together.’
‘Uncle, you will employ the very best people on his side.’ He named a
well-known Old Bailey pleader of those days. ‘Do not stint in money,
uncle. All that I have in the world is Tom’s,’ I said.
‘The deuce of it is,’ exclaimed my uncle, thumping his knee, ‘we have
no witnesses to call except as to character. It’s four-tongued positive
swearing on one side, and single-tongued negative swearing on the
other.’
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.’
‘Before God I am innocent,’ he repeated softly and without passion in
his tones or posture. ‘It is a devilish plot of Rotch to ruin me. I
don’t know why the carpenter Nodder should swear against me. I had no
quarrel with the man. But he’d go to the gallows for drink, and in that
Rotch found his opportunity since he needed a witness.’
‘You will be able to prove your innocence.’
‘Rotch,’ he continued, still speaking softly and without temper,
‘bored holes in the lazarette; then plugged the lining and hid the
auger in my cabin. Nodder swears that I borrowed the auger from him.
A lie, Marian--a wicked, horrible lie. Why should I borrow an auger?
Why should I, as captain, handle such a tool as that when there is a
carpenter in the ship? Rotch brought some of the men aft to listen to
the water running into the lazarette. He says that he went below to
break out stores and heard it. A hellish lie, Marian. He swears that he
plugged the holes to stop the leaks and came up with the men to search
my cabin. I was in my cabin when they entered, and on the scoundrel
Rotch charging me with attempting to scuttle the barque and imperilling
the lives of the crew, I pulled a pistol out of my drawer and would
have shot him. They threw themselves upon me, and Rotch called to them
to search the cabin, and they found the auger in the place where the
villain had hidden it. But this was not all. Rotch swore before the
Consul at Rio that he had seen me go into the lazarette, and that he
had mentioned the circumstance to Nodder, but that neither suspected
what I was doing until Rotch himself went below for some boatswain’s
stores, and then he heard the water running in. Marian,’ and here he
slightly raised his voice, ‘it is a conspiracy, artfully planned,
artfully executed, artfully related, with the accursed accident of the
over-insured venture to make it significant as death, and God alone
knows how it may go with me.’
A warder paused and looked at us, then passed on.
‘Don’t say that,’ I cried; ‘it breaks my heart to hear you say that.
You are innocent. My uncle will employ clever men. They will question
and question and prove the wretches liars, and our turn will come.’
‘I blundered by over-insuring, but I blundered more fearfully still
when in a moment of confidence I told the villain Rotch what money I
had embarked in this voyage, and to what extent I had protected myself.’
‘Tom, whatever happens I am with you. Oh, if it should come to their
killing you they shall kill me too, Tom.’
He pressed his hands to his heart and then sobbed twice or thrice. My
love, my grief, my misery raged in me; I felt that I had strength to
tear down the strong iron grating which separated us, that I might
get to him, clasp him to me, give him the comfort of my bosom, the
tenderness of my caressing cheek. It worked like madness in my soul to
be held apart from him, to see him and not be able to fling my arms
around him.
We looked at each other in silence. I was about to speak when a bell
rang, and a strong voice called out: ‘Time’s up!’ The prize-fighter was
gone. A warder marched quickly along to Tom and touched him on the
shoulder, and my uncle called to me: ‘Come, Marian.’ Tom cried: ‘God
bless you, dear,’ but my vision was blind with tears, a sudden swooning
headache made me stagger, and until I was in the street I was scarcely
sensible of more than of being led through the passages and out through
the gate by my uncle.