Breaking the silence they had hitherto preserved, they raised a great
cry as soon as they were ranged before the jail, and demanded to speak
to the governor. This visit was not wholly unexpected, for his house,
which fronted the street, was strongly barricaded, the wicket-gate of
the prison was closed up, and at no loophole or grating was any person
to be seen. Before they had repeated their summons many times, a man
appeared upon the roof of the governor’s house, and asked what it was
they wanted.
Some said one thing, some another, and some only groaned and hissed. It
being now nearly dark, and the house high, many persons in the throng
were not aware that any one had come to answer them, and continued their
clamour until the intelligence was gradually diffused through the whole
concourse. Ten minutes or more elapsed before any one voice could be
heard with tolerable distinctness; during which interval the figure
remained perched alone, against the summer-evening sky, looking down
into the troubled street.
‘Are you,’ said Hugh at length, ‘Mr Akerman, the head jailer here?’
‘Of course he is, brother,’ whispered Dennis. But Hugh, without minding
him, took his answer from the man himself.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’
‘You have got some friends of ours in your custody, master.’
‘I have a good many people in my custody.’ He glanced downward, as
he spoke, into the jail: and the feeling that he could see into the
different yards, and that he overlooked everything which was hidden from
their view by the rugged walls, so lashed and goaded the mob, that they
howled like wolves.
‘Deliver up our friends,’ said Hugh, ‘and you may keep the rest.’
‘It’s my duty to keep them all. I shall do my duty.’
‘If you don’t throw the doors open, we shall break ‘em down,’ said Hugh;
‘for we will have the rioters out.’
‘All I can do, good people,’ Akerman replied, ‘is to exhort you to
disperse; and to remind you that the consequences of any disturbance in
this place, will be very severe, and bitterly repented by most of you,
when it is too late.’
He made as though he would retire when he said these words, but he was
checked by the voice of the locksmith.
‘Mr Akerman,’ cried Gabriel, ‘Mr Akerman.’
‘I will hear no more from any of you,’ replied the governor, turning
towards the speaker, and waving his hand.
‘But I am not one of them,’ said Gabriel. ‘I am an honest man, Mr
Akerman; a respectable tradesman--Gabriel Varden, the locksmith. You
know me?’
‘You among the crowd!’ cried the governor in an altered voice.
‘Brought here by force--brought here to pick the lock of the great door
for them,’ rejoined the locksmith. ‘Bear witness for me, Mr Akerman,
that I refuse to do it; and that I will not do it, come what may of my
refusal. If any violence is done to me, please to remember this.’
‘Is there no way of helping you?’ said the governor.
‘None, Mr Akerman. You’ll do your duty, and I’ll do mine. Once again,
you robbers and cut-throats,’ said the locksmith, turning round upon
them, ‘I refuse. Ah! Howl till you’re hoarse. I refuse.’
‘Stay--stay!’ said the jailer, hastily. ‘Mr Varden, I know you for
a worthy man, and one who would do no unlawful act except upon
compulsion--’
‘Upon compulsion, sir,’ interposed the locksmith, who felt that the tone
in which this was said, conveyed the speaker’s impression that he had
ample excuse for yielding to the furious multitude who beset and hemmed
him in, on every side, and among whom he stood, an old man, quite alone;
‘upon compulsion, sir, I’ll do nothing.’
‘Where is that man,’ said the keeper, anxiously, ‘who spoke to me just
now?’
‘Here!’ Hugh replied.
‘Do you know what the guilt of murder is, and that by keeping that
honest tradesman at your side you endanger his life!’
‘We know it very well,’ he answered, ‘for what else did we bring him
here? Let’s have our friends, master, and you shall have your friend. Is
that fair, lads?’
The mob replied to him with a loud Hurrah!
‘You see how it is, sir?’ cried Varden. ‘Keep ‘em out, in King George’s
name. Remember what I have said. Good night!’
There was no more parley. A shower of stones and other missiles
compelled the keeper of the jail to retire; and the mob, pressing on,
and swarming round the walls, forced Gabriel Varden close up to the
door.
In vain the basket of tools was laid upon the ground before him, and
he was urged in turn by promises, by blows, by offers of reward, and
threats of instant death, to do the office for which they had brought
him there. ‘No,’ cried the sturdy locksmith, ‘I will not!’
He had never loved his life so well as then, but nothing could move him.
The savage faces that glared upon him, look where he would; the cries of
those who thirsted, like wild animals, for his blood; the sight of men
pressing forward, and trampling down their fellows, as they strove to
reach him, and struck at him above the heads of other men, with axes and
with iron bars; all failed to daunt him. He looked from man to man, and
face to face, and still, with quickened breath and lessening colour,
cried firmly, ‘I will not!’
Dennis dealt him a blow upon the face which felled him to the ground. He
sprung up again like a man in the prime of life, and with blood upon his
forehead, caught him by the throat.
‘You cowardly dog!’ he said: ‘Give me my daughter. Give me my daughter.’
They struggled together. Some cried ‘Kill him,’ and some (but they were
not near enough) strove to trample him to death. Tug as he would at the
old man’s wrists, the hangman could not force him to unclench his hands.
‘Is this all the return you make me, you ungrateful monster?’ he
articulated with great difficulty, and with many oaths.
‘Give me my daughter!’ cried the locksmith, who was now as fierce as
those who gathered round him: ‘Give me my daughter!’
He was down again, and up, and down once more, and buffeting with a
score of them, who bandied him from hand to hand, when one tall fellow,
fresh from a slaughter-house, whose dress and great thigh-boots smoked
hot with grease and blood, raised a pole-axe, and swearing a horrible
oath, aimed it at the old man’s uncovered head. At that instant, and in
the very act, he fell himself, as if struck by lightning, and over his
body a one-armed man came darting to the locksmith’s side. Another man
was with him, and both caught the locksmith roughly in their grasp.
‘Leave him to us!’ they cried to Hugh--struggling, as they spoke, to
force a passage backward through the crowd. ‘Leave him to us. Why do you
waste your whole strength on such as he, when a couple of men can finish
him in as many minutes! You lose time. Remember the prisoners! remember
Barnaby!’
The cry ran through the mob. Hammers began to rattle on the walls; and
every man strove to reach the prison, and be among the foremost rank.
Fighting their way through the press and struggle, as desperately as if
they were in the midst of enemies rather than their own friends, the two
men retreated with the locksmith between them, and dragged him through
the very heart of the concourse.
And now the strokes began to fall like hail upon the gate, and on the
strong building; for those who could not reach the door, spent their
fierce rage on anything--even on the great blocks of stone, which
shivered their weapons into fragments, and made their hands and arms to
tingle as if the walls were active in their stout resistance, and dealt
them back their blows. The clash of iron ringing upon iron, mingled
with the deafening tumult and sounded high above it, as the great
sledge-hammers rattled on the nailed and plated door: the sparks flew
off in showers; men worked in gangs, and at short intervals relieved
each other, that all their strength might be devoted to the work; but
there stood the portal still, as grim and dark and strong as ever, and,
saving for the dints upon its battered surface, quite unchanged.
While some brought all their energies to bear upon this toilsome task;
and some, rearing ladders against the prison, tried to clamber to the
summit of the walls they were too short to scale; and some again engaged
a body of police a hundred strong, and beat them back and trod them
under foot by force of numbers; others besieged the house on which the
jailer had appeared, and driving in the door, brought out his furniture,
and piled it up against the prison-gate, to make a bonfire which should
burn it down. As soon as this device was understood, all those who had
laboured hitherto, cast down their tools and helped to swell the heap;
which reached half-way across the street, and was so high, that those
who threw more fuel on the top, got up by ladders. When all the keeper’s
goods were flung upon this costly pile, to the last fragment, they
smeared it with the pitch, and tar, and rosin they had brought, and
sprinkled it with turpentine. To all the woodwork round the prison-doors
they did the like, leaving not a joist or beam untouched. This infernal
christening performed, they fired the pile with lighted matches and with
blazing tow, and then stood by, awaiting the result.
The furniture being very dry, and rendered more combustible by wax
and oil, besides the arts they had used, took fire at once. The flames
roared high and fiercely, blackening the prison-wall, and twining up
its loftly front like burning serpents. At first they crowded round the
blaze, and vented their exultation only in their looks: but when it grew
hotter and fiercer--when it crackled, leaped, and roared, like a great
furnace--when it shone upon the opposite houses, and lighted up not only
the pale and wondering faces at the windows, but the inmost corners of
each habitation--when through the deep red heat and glow, the fire was
seen sporting and toying with the door, now clinging to its obdurate
surface, now gliding off with fierce inconstancy and soaring high into
the sky, anon returning to fold it in its burning grasp and lure it to
its ruin--when it shone and gleamed so brightly that the church clock of
St Sepulchre’s so often pointing to the hour of death, was legible as in
broad day, and the vane upon its steeple-top glittered in the unwonted
light like something richly jewelled--when blackened stone and sombre
brick grew ruddy in the deep reflection, and windows shone like
burnished gold, dotting the longest distance in the fiery vista
with their specks of brightness--when wall and tower, and roof and
chimney-stack, seemed drunk, and in the flickering glare appeared to
reel and stagger--when scores of objects, never seen before, burst out
upon the view, and things the most familiar put on some new aspect--then
the mob began to join the whirl, and with loud yells, and shouts, and
clamour, such as happily is seldom heard, bestirred themselves to feed
the fire, and keep it at its height.
Although the heat was so intense that the paint on the houses over
against the prison, parched and crackled up, and swelling into boils,
as it were from excess of torture, broke and crumbled away; although the
glass fell from the window-sashes, and the lead and iron on the roofs
blistered the incautious hand that touched them, and the sparrows in the
eaves took wing, and rendered giddy by the smoke, fell fluttering down
upon the blazing pile; still the fire was tended unceasingly by busy
hands, and round it, men were going always. They never slackened in
their zeal, or kept aloof, but pressed upon the flames so hard, that
those in front had much ado to save themselves from being thrust in; if
one man swooned or dropped, a dozen struggled for his place, and that
although they knew the pain, and thirst, and pressure to be unendurable.
Those who fell down in fainting-fits, and were not crushed or burnt,
were carried to an inn-yard close at hand, and dashed with water from a
pump; of which buckets full were passed from man to man among the crowd;
but such was the strong desire of all to drink, and such the fighting to
be first, that, for the most part, the whole contents were spilled upon
the ground, without the lips of one man being moistened.
Meanwhile, and in the midst of all the roar and outcry, those who were
nearest to the pile, heaped up again the burning fragments that came
toppling down, and raked the fire about the door, which, although a
sheet of flame, was still a door fast locked and barred, and kept
them out. Great pieces of blazing wood were passed, besides, above the
people’s heads to such as stood about the ladders, and some of these,
climbing up to the topmost stave, and holding on with one hand by the
prison wall, exerted all their skill and force to cast these fire-brands
on the roof, or down into the yards within. In many instances their
efforts were successful; which occasioned a new and appalling addition
to the horrors of the scene: for the prisoners within, seeing from
between their bars that the fire caught in many places and thrived
fiercely, and being all locked up in strong cells for the night, began
to know that they were in danger of being burnt alive. This terrible
fear, spreading from cell to cell and from yard to yard, vented itself
in such dismal cries and wailings, and in such dreadful shrieks for
help, that the whole jail resounded with the noise; which was loudly
heard even above the shouting of the mob and roaring of the flames, and
was so full of agony and despair, that it made the boldest tremble.
It was remarkable that these cries began in that quarter of the jail
which fronted Newgate Street, where, it was well known, the men who were
to suffer death on Thursday were confined. And not only were these four
who had so short a time to live, the first to whom the dread of being
burnt occurred, but they were, throughout, the most importunate of all:
for they could be plainly heard, notwithstanding the great thickness of
the walls, crying that the wind set that way, and that the flames would
shortly reach them; and calling to the officers of the jail to come
and quench the fire from a cistern which was in their yard, and full
of water. Judging from what the crowd outside the walls could hear from
time to time, these four doomed wretches never ceased to call for
help; and that with as much distraction, and in as great a frenzy of
attachment to existence, as though each had an honoured, happy life
before him, instead of eight-and-forty hours of miserable imprisonment,
and then a violent and shameful death.
But the anguish and suffering of the two sons of one of these men, when
they heard, or fancied that they heard, their father’s voice, is past
description. After wringing their hands and rushing to and fro as if
they were stark mad, one mounted on the shoulders of his brother, and
tried to clamber up the face of the high wall, guarded at the top with
spikes and points of iron. And when he fell among the crowd, he was not
deterred by his bruises, but mounted up again, and fell again, and, when
he found the feat impossible, began to beat the stones and tear them
with his hands, as if he could that way make a breach in the strong
building, and force a passage in. At last, they cleft their way among
the mob about the door, though many men, a dozen times their match, had
tried in vain to do so, and were seen, in--yes, in--the fire, striving
to prize it down, with crowbars.
Nor were they alone affected by the outcry from within the prison. The
women who were looking on, shrieked loudly, beat their hands together,
stopped their ears; and many fainted: the men who were not near the
walls and active in the siege, rather than do nothing, tore up the
pavement of the street, and did so with a haste and fury they could
not have surpassed if that had been the jail, and they were near their
object. Not one living creature in the throng was for an instant still.
The whole great mass were mad.
A shout! Another! Another yet, though few knew why, or what it meant.
But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield, and drop from its
topmost hinge. It hung on that side by but one, but it was upright
still, because of the bar, and its having sunk, of its own weight, into
the heap of ashes at its foot. There was now a gap at the top of the
doorway, through which could be descried a gloomy passage, cavernous and
dark. Pile up the fire!
It burnt fiercely. The door was red-hot, and the gap wider. They vainly
tried to shield their faces with their hands, and standing as if in
readiness for a spring, watched the place. Dark figures, some crawling
on their hands and knees, some carried in the arms of others, were seen
to pass along the roof. It was plain the jail could hold out no longer.
The keeper, and his officers, and their wives and children, were
escaping. Pile up the fire!
The door sank down again: it settled deeper in the
cinders--tottered--yielded--was down!
As they shouted again, they fell back, for a moment, and left a clear
space about the fire that lay between them and the jail entry. Hugh
leapt upon the blazing heap, and scattering a train of sparks into the
air, and making the dark lobby glitter with those that hung upon his
dress, dashed into the jail.
The hangman followed. And then so many rushed upon their track, that the
fire got trodden down and thinly strewn about the street; but there was
no need of it now, for, inside and out, the prison was in flames.