Let me not linger too much over those sad times. Morning came on as

usual; for it is strange, but true, that to the very wretched it seems

wonderful that times and seasons should keep their appointed courses in

the midst of such mighty overthrows, and such interruption to the

courses of their own wonted happiness and their habitual expectations.

Why should morning and night, why should all movements in the natural

world be so regular, whilst in the moral world all is so irregular and

anomalous? Yet the sun and the moon rise and set as usual upon the

mightiest revolutions of empire and of worldly fortune that this planet

ever beholds; and it is sometimes even a comfort to know that this will

be the case. A great criminal, sentenced to an agonizing punishment,

has derived a fortitude and a consolation from recollecting that the

day would run its inevitable course--that a day after all was

_but_ a day--that the mighty wheel of alternate light and darkness

must and would revolve--and that the evening star would rise as usual,

and shine with its untroubled lustre upon the dust and ashes of what

_had_ indeed suffered, and so recently, the most bitter pangs, but

would then have ceased to suffer. 'La Journée,' said Damien,

'La journée sera dure, mais elle se passera.'

'----_Se passera_:' yes, that is true, I whispered to myself; my

day also, my season of trial will be hard to bear; but that also will

have an end; that also '_se passera_.' Thus I talked or thought so

long as I thought at all; for the hour was now rapidly approaching,

when thinking in any shape would for some time be at an end for me.

That day, as the morning advanced, I went again, accompanied by Hannah,

to the police court and to the prison--a vast, ancient, in parts

ruinous, and most gloomy pile of building. In those days the

administration of justice was, if not more corrupt, certainly in its

inferior departments by far more careless than it is at present, and

liable to thousands of interruptions and mal-practices, supporting

themselves upon old traditionary usages which required at least half a

century, and the shattering everywhere given to old systems by the

French Revolution, together with the universal energy of mind applied

to those subjects over the whole length and breadth of Christendom, to

approach with any effectual reforms. Knowing this, and having myself

had direct personal cognisance of various cases in which bribery had

been applied with success, I was not without considerable hope that

perhaps Hannah and myself might avail ourselves of this irregular

passport through the gates of the prison. And, had the new regulation

been of somewhat longer standing, there is little doubt that I should

have been found right; unfortunately, as yet it had all the freshness

of newborn vigor, and kept itself in remembrance by the singular

irritation it excited. Besides this, it was a pet novelty of one

particular minister, new to the possession of power, anxious to

distinguish himself, proud of his creative functions within the range

of his office, and very sensitively jealous on the point of opposition

to his mandates. Vain, therefore, on this day were all my efforts to

corrupt the jailers; and, in fact, anticipating a time when I might

have occasion to corrupt some of them for a more important purpose and

on a larger scale, I did not think it prudent to proclaim my character

beforehand as one who tampered with such means, and thus to arm against

myself those jealousies in official people, which it was so peculiarly

important that I should keep asleep.

All that day, however, I lingered about the avenues and vast courts in

the precincts of the prison, and near one particular wing of the

building, which had been pointed out to me by a jailer as the section

allotted to those who were in the situation of Agnes; that is, waiting

their final commitment for trial. The building generally he could

indicate with certainty, but he professed himself unable to indicate

the particular part of it which 'the young woman brought in on the day

previous' would be likely to occupy; consequently he could not point

out the window from which her cell (her '_cell_!' what a word!)

would be lighted. 'But, master,' he went on to say, 'I would advise

nobody to try that game.' He looked with an air so significant, and at

the same time used a gesture so indicative of private understanding,

that I at once apprehended his meaning, and assured him that he had

altogether misconstrued my drift; that, as to attempts at escape, or at

any mode of communicating with the prisoner from the outside, I trusted

all _that_ was perfectly needless; and that at any rate in my eyes

it was perfectly hopeless. 'Well, master,' he replied, 'that's neither

here nor there. You've come down handsomely, that I _will_ say;

and where a gentleman acts like a gentleman, and behaves himself as

such, I'm not the man to go and split upon him for a word. To be sure

it's quite nat'ral that a gentleman--put case that a young woman is his

fancy woman--it's nothing but nat'ral that he should want to get her

out of such an old rat-hole as this, where many's the fine-timbered

creature, both he and she, that has lain to rot, and has never got out

of the old trap at all, first or last'----'How so?' I interrupted him;

'surely they don't detain the corpses of prisoners?' 'Ay, but mind you

--put case that he or that she should die in this rat-trap before

sentence is past, why then the prison counts them as its own children,

and buries them in its own chapel--that old stack of pigeon-holes that

you see up yonder to the right hand.' So then, after all, thought I, if

my poor Agnes should, in her desolation and solitary confinement to

these wretched walls, find her frail strength give way--should the

moral horrors of her situation work their natural effect upon her

health, and she should chance to die within this dungeon, here within

this same dungeon will she lie to the resurrection, and in that case

her prison-doors have already closed upon her for ever. The man, who

perhaps had some rough kindness in his nature, though tainted by the

mercenary feelings too inevitably belonging to his situation, seemed to

guess at the character of my ruminations by the change of my

countenance, for he expressed some pity for my being 'in so much

trouble;' and it seemed to increase his respect for me that this

trouble should be directed to the case of a woman, for he appeared to

have a manly sense of the peculiar appeal made to the honor and

gallantry of man, by the mere general fact of the feebleness and the

dependence of woman. I looked at him more attentively in consequence of

the feeling tone in which he now spoke, and was surprised that I had

not more particularly noticed him before; he was a fine looking,

youngish man, with a bold Robin-hood style of figure and appearance;

and, morally speaking, he was absolutely transfigured to my eyes by the

effect worked upon him for the moment, through the simple calling up of

his better nature. However, he recurred to his cautions about the peril

in a legal sense of tampering with the windows, bolts, and bars of the

old decaying prison; which, in fact, precisely according to the degree

in which its absolute power over its prisoners was annually growing

less and less, grew more and more jealous of its own reputation, and

punished the attempts to break loose with the more severity, in exact

proportion as they were the more tempting by the chances of success. I

persisted in disowning any schemes of the sort, and especially upon the

ground of their hopelessness. But this, on the other hand, was a ground

that in his inner thoughts he treated with scorn; and I could easily

see that, with a little skilful management of opportunity, I might,

upon occasion, draw from him all the secrets he knew as to the special

points of infirmity in this old ruinous building. For the present, and

until it should certainly appear that there was some use to be derived

from this species of knowledge, I forbore to raise superfluous

suspicions by availing myself further of his communicative disposition.

Taking, however, the precaution of securing his name, together with his

particular office and designation in the prison, I parted from him as

if to go home, but in fact to resume my sad roamings up and down the

precincts of the jail.

What made these precincts much larger than otherwise they would have

been, was the circumstance that, by a usage derived from older days,

both criminal prisoners and those who were prisoners for debt, equally

fell under the custody of this huge caravanserai for the indifferent

reception of crime, of misdemeanor, and of misfortune. And those who

came under the two first titles, were lodged here through all stages of

their connection with public justice; alike when mere objects of vague

suspicion to the police, when under examination upon a specific charge,

when fully committed for trial, when convicted and under sentence,

awaiting the execution of that sentence, and, in a large proportion of

cases, even through their final stage of punishment, when it happened

to be of any nature compatible with in-door confinement. Hence it arose

that the number of those who haunted the prison gates, with or without

a title to admission, was enormous; all the relatives, or more properly

the acquaintances and connections of the criminal population within the

prison, being swelled by all the families of needy debtors who came

daily, either to offer the consolation of their society, or to diminish

their common expenditure by uniting their slender establishments. One

of the rules applied to the management of this vast multitude that were

every day candidates for admission was, that to save the endless

trouble as well as risk, perhaps, of opening and shutting the main

gates to every successive arrival, periodic intervals were fixed for

the admission by wholesale; and as these periods came round every two

hours, it would happen at many parts of the day that vast crowds

accumulated waiting for the next opening of the gate. These crowds were

assembled in two or three large outer courts, in which also were many

stalls and booths, kept there upon some local privilege of ancient

inheritance, or upon some other plea made good by gifts or bribes--some

by Jews and others by Christians, perhaps equally Jewish. Superadded to

these stationary elements of this miscellaneous population, were others

drawn thither by pure motives of curiosity, so that altogether an

almost permanent mob was gathered together in these courts; and amid

this mob it was,--from I know not what definite motive, partly because

I thought it probable that amongst these people I should hear the cause

of Agnes peculiarly the subject of conversation; and so, in fact, it

did really happen,--but partly, and even more, I believe, because I now

awfully began to shrink from solitude. Tumult I must have, and

distraction of thought. Amid this mob, I say, it was that I passed two

days. Feverish I had been from the first--and from bad to worse, in

such a case, was, at any rate, a natural progress; but, perhaps, also

amongst this crowd of the poor, the abjectly wretched, the ill-fed, the

desponding, and the dissolute, there might be very naturally a larger

body of contagion lurking than according to their mere numerical

expectations. There was at that season a very extensive depopulation

going on in some quarters of this great metropolis, and in other cities

of the same empire, by means of a very malignant typhus. This fever is

supposed to be the peculiar product of jails; and though it had not as

yet been felt as a scourge and devastator of this particular jail, or

at least the consequent mortality had been hitherto kept down to a

moderate amount, yet it was highly probable that a certain quantity of

contagion, much beyond the proportion of other popular assemblages less

uniformly wretched in their composition, was here to be found all day

long; and doubtless my excited state, and irritable habit of body, had

offered a peculiar predisposition that favored the rapid development of

this contagion. However this might be, the result was, that on the

evening of the second day which I spent in haunting the purlieus of the

prison, (consequently the night preceding the second public examination

of Agnes,) I was attacked by ardent fever in such unmitigated fury,

that before morning I had lost all command of my intellectual

faculties. For some weeks I became a pitiable maniac, and in every

sense the wreck of my former self; and seven entire weeks, together

with the better half of an eighth week, had passed over my head whilst

I lay unconscious of time and its dreadful freight of events, excepting

in so far as my disordered brain, by its fantastic coinages, created

endless mimicries and mockeries of these events--less substantial, but

oftentimes less afflicting, or less agitating. It would have been well

for me had my destiny decided that I was not to be recalled to this

world of wo. But I had no such happiness in store. I recovered, and

through twenty and eight years my groans have recorded the sorrow I

feel that I did.

* * * * *

I shall not rehearse circumstantially, and point by point, the sad

unfolding, as it proceeded through successive revelations to me, of all

which had happened during my state of physical incapacity. When I first

became aware that my wandering senses had returned to me, and knew, by

the cessation of all throbbings, and the unutterable pains that had so

long possessed my brain, that I was now returning from the gates of

death, a sad confusion assailed me as to some indefinite cloud of evil

that had been hovering over me at the time when I first fell into a

state of insensibility. For a time I struggled vainly to recover the

lost connection of my thoughts, and I endeavored ineffectually to

address myself to sleep. I opened my eyes, but found the glare of light

painful beyond measure. Strength, however, it seemed to me that I had,

and more than enough, to raise myself out of bed. I made the attempt,

but fell back, almost giddy with the effort. At the sound of the

disturbance which I had thus made, a woman whom I did not know came

from behind a curtain, and spoke to me. Shrinking from any

communication with a stranger, especially one whose discretion I could

not estimate in making discoveries to me with the requisite caution, I

asked her simply what o'clock it was.

'Eleven in the forenoon,' she replied.

'And what day of the month?'

'The second,' was her brief answer.

I felt almost a sense of shame in adding--; 'The second! but of what

month?'

'Of June,' was the startling rejoinder.

On the 8th of April I had fallen ill, and it was now actually the 2d of

June. Oh! sickening calculation! revolting register of hours! for in

that same moment which brought back this one recollection, perhaps by

steadying my brain, rushed back in a torrent all the other dreadful

remembrances of the period, and now the more so, because, though the

event was still uncertain as regarded my knowledge, it must have become

dreadfully certain as regarded the facts of the case, and the happiness

of all who were concerned. Alas! one little circumstance too painfully

assured me that this event had not been a happy one. Had Agnes been

restored to her liberty and her home, where would she have been found

but watching at my bed-side? That too certainly I knew, and the

inference was too bitter to support.

On this same day, some hours afterwards, upon Hannah's return from the

city, I received from her, and heard with perfect calmness, the whole

sum of evil which awaited me. Little Francis--she took up her tale at

that point--'was with God:' so she expressed herself. He had died of

the same fever which had attacked me--had died and been buried nearly

five weeks before. Too probably he had caught the infection from me.

Almost--such are the caprices of human feeling--almost I could have

rejoiced that this young memorial of my vanished happiness had vanished

also. It gave me a pang, nevertheless, that the grave should thus have

closed upon him before I had seen his fair little face again. But I

steeled my heart to hear worse things than this. Next she went on to

inform me that already, on the first or second day of our calamity, she

had taken upon herself, without waiting for authority, on observing the

rapid approaches of illness in me, and arguing the state of

helplessness which would follow, to write off at once a summons in the

most urgent terms to the brother of my wife. This gentleman, whom I

shall call Pierpoint, was a high-spirited, generous young man as I have

ever known. When I say that he was a sportsman, that at one season of

the year he did little else than pursue his darling amusement of fox-

hunting, for which indeed he had almost a maniacal passion--saying

this, I shall already have prejudged him in the opinions of many, who

fancy all such persons the slaves of corporeal enjoyments. But, with

submission, the truth lies the other way. According to my experience,

people of these habits have their bodies more than usually under their

command, as being subdued by severe exercise; and their minds, neither

better nor worse on an average than those of their neighbors, are more

available from being so much more rarely clogged by morbid habits in

that uneasy yoke-fellow of the intellectual part--the body. He at all

events was a man to justify in his own person this way of thinking; for

he was a man not only of sound, but even of bold and energetic

intellect, and in all moral respects one whom any man might feel proud

to call his friend. This young man, Pierpoint, without delay obeyed the

summons; and on being made acquainted with what had already passed, the

first step he took was to call upon Barratt, and without further

question than what might ascertain his identity, he proceeded to

inflict upon him a severe horsewhipping. A worse step on his sister's

account he could not have taken. Previously to this the popular feeling

had run strongly against Barratt, but now its unity was broken. A new

element was introduced into the question: Democratic feelings were

armed against this outrage; gentlemen and nobles, it was said, thought

themselves not amenable to justice; and again, the majesty of the law

was offended at this intrusion upon an affair already under solemn

course of adjudication. Everything, however, passes away under the

healing hand of time, and this also faded from the public mind. People

remembered also that he was a brother, and in that character, at any

rate, had a right to some allowances for his intemperance; and what

quickened the oblivion of the affair was, which in itself was

sufficiently strange, that Barratt did not revive the case in the

public mind by seeking legal reparation for his injuries. It was,

however, still matter of regret that Pierpoint should have indulged

himself in this movement of passion, since undoubtedly it broke and

disturbed the else uniform stream of public indignation, by investing

the original aggressor with something like the character of an injured

person; and therefore with some set-off to plead against his own

wantonness of malice;--his malice might now assume the nobler aspect of

revenge.

Thus far, in reporting the circumstances, Hannah had dallied--thus far

I had rejoiced that she dallied, with the main burden of the wo; but

now there remained nothing to dally with any longer--and she rushed

along in her narrative, hurrying to tell--I hurrying to hear. A second,

a third examination had ensued, then a final committal--all this within

a week. By that time all the world was agitated with the case;

literally not the city only, vast as that city was, but the nation was

convulsed and divided into parties upon the question, Whether the

prosecution were one of mere malice or not? The very government of the

land was reported to be equally interested, and almost equally divided

in opinion. In this state of public feeling came the trial. Image to

yourself, oh reader, whosoever you are, the intensity of the excitement

which by that time had arisen in all people to be spectators of the

scene--then image to yourself the effect of all this, a perfect

consciousness that in herself as a centre was settled the whole mighty

interest of the exhibition--that interest again of so dubious and mixed

a character--sympathy in some with mere misfortune--sympathy in others

with female frailty and guilt, not perhaps founded upon an absolute

unwavering belief in her innocence, even amongst those who were most

loud and positive as partisans in affirming it,--and then remember that

all this hideous scenical display and notoriety settled upon one whose

very nature, constitutionally timid, recoiled with the triple agony of

womanly shame--of matronly dignity--of insulted innocence, from every

mode and shape of public display. Combine all these circumstances and

elements of the case, and you may faintly enter into the situation of

my poor Agnes. Perhaps the best way to express it at once is by

recurring to the case of a young female Christian martyr, in the early

ages of Christianity, exposed in the bloody amphitheatre of Rome or

Verona, to 'fight with wild beasts,' as it was expressed in mockery--

she to fight the lamb to fight with lions! But in reality the young

martyr _had_ a fight to maintain, and a fight (in contempt of that

cruel mockery) fiercer than the fiercest of her persecutors could have

faced perhaps--the combat with the instincts of her own shrinking,

trembling, fainting nature. Such a fight had my Agnes to maintain; and

at that time there was a large party of gentlemen in whom the

gentlemanly instinct was predominant, and who felt so powerfully the

cruel indignities of her situation, that they made a public appeal in

her behalf. One thing, and a strong one, which they said, was this:--

'We all talk and move in this case as if, because the question appears

doubtful to some people, and the accused party to some people wears a

doubtful character, it would follow that she therefore had in reality a

mixed character composed in joint proportions of the best and the worst

that is imputed to her. But let us not forget that this mixed character

belongs not to her, but to the infirmity of our human judgments--

_they_ are mixed--_they_ are dubious--but she is not--she is,

or she is not, guilty--there is no middle case--and let us consider for

a single moment, that if this young lady (as many among us heartily

believe) _is_ innocent, then and upon that supposition let us

consider how cruel we should all think the public exposure which

aggravates the other injuries (as in that case they must be thought) to

which her situation exposes her.' They went on to make some suggestions

for the officers of the court in preparing the arrangements for the

trial, and some also for the guidance of the audience, which showed the

same generous anxiety for sparing the feelings of the prisoner. If

these did not wholly succeed in repressing the open avowal of coarse

and brutal curiosity amongst the intensely vulgar, at least they

availed to diffuse amongst the neutral and indifferent part of the

public a sentiment of respect and forbearance which, emanating from

high quarters, had a very extensive influence upon most of what met the

eye or the ear of my poor wife. She, on the day of trial, was supported

by her brother; and by that time she needed support indeed. I was

reported to be dying; her little son was dead; neither had she been

allowed to see him. Perhaps these things, by weaning her from all

further care about life, might have found their natural effect in

making her indifferent to the course of the trial, or even to its

issue. And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some

lingering sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old

sympathies, 'the hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed

over the deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment

into a starry light--sweet and woful to remember. Then----but why

linger? I hurry to the close: she was pronounced guilty; whether by a

jury or a bench of judges, I do not say--having determined, from the

beginning, to give no hint of the land in which all these events

happened; neither is that of the slightest consequence. Guilty she was

pronounced: but sentence at that time was deferred. Ask me not, I

beseech you, about the muff or other circumstances inconsistent with

the hostile evidence. These circumstances had the testimony, you will

observe, of my own servants only; nay, as it turned out, of one servant

exclusively: _that_ naturally diminished their value. And, on the

other side, evidence was arrayed, perjury was suborned, that would have

wrecked a wilderness of simple truth trusting to its own unaided

forces. What followed? Did this judgment of the court settle the

opinion of the public? Opinion of the public! Did it settle the winds?

Did it settle the motion of the Atlantic? Wilder, fiercer, and louder

grew the cry against the wretched accuser: mighty had been the power

over the vast audience of the dignity, the affliction, the perfect

simplicity, and the Madonna beauty of the prisoner. That beauty so

childlike, and at the same time so saintly, made, besides, so touching

in its pathos by means of the abandonment--the careless abandonment and

the infinite desolation of her air and manner--would of itself, and

without further aid, have made many converts. Much more was done by the

simplicity of her statements, and the indifference with which she

neglected to improve any strong points in her own favor--the

indifference, as every heart perceived, of despairing grief. Then came

the manners on the hostile side--the haggard consciousness of guilt,

the drooping tone, the bravado and fierce strut which sought to

dissemble all this. Not one amongst all the witnesses, assembled on

that side, had (by all agreement) the bold natural tone of conscious

uprightness. Hence it could not be surprising that the storm of popular

opinion made itself heard with a louder and a louder sound. The

government itself began to be disturbed; the ministers of the sovereign

were agitated; and, had no menaces been thrown out, it was generally

understood that they would have given way to the popular voice, now

continually more distinct and clamorous. In the midst of all this

tumult, obscure murmurs began to arise that Barratt had practised the

same or similar villanies in former instances. One case in particular

was beginning to be whispered about, which at once threw a light upon

the whole affair: it was the case of a young and very beautiful married

woman, who had been on the very brink of a catastrophe such as had

befallen my own wife, when some seasonable interference, of what nature

was not known, had critically delivered her. This case arose 'like a

little cloud no bigger than a man's hand,' then spread and threatened

to burst in tempest upon the public mind, when all at once, more

suddenly even than it had arisen, it was hushed up, or in some way

disappeared. But a trifling circumstance made it possible to trace this

case:--in after times, when means offered, but unfortunately no

particular purpose of good, nor any purpose, in fact, beyond that of

curiosity, it _was_ traced; and enough was soon ascertained to

have blown to fragments any possible conspiracy emanating from this

Barratt, had that been of any further importance. However, in spite of

all that money or art could effect, a sullen growl continued to be

heard amongst the populace of villanies many and profound that had been

effected or attempted by this Barratt; and accordingly, much in the

same way as was many years afterwards practised in London, when a

hosier had caused several young people to be prosecuted to death for

passing forged bank-notes, the wrath of the people showed itself in

marking the shop for vengeance upon any favorable occasion offering

through fire or riots, and in the mean time in deserting it. These

things had been going on for some time when I awoke from my long

delirium; but the effect they had produced upon a weak and obstinate

and haughty government, or at least upon the weak and obstinate and

haughty member of the government who presided in the police

administration, was, to confirm and rivet the line of conduct which had

been made the object of popular denunciation. More energetically, more

scornfully, to express that determination of flying in the face of

public opinion and censure, four days before my awakening, Agnes had

been brought up to receive her sentence. On that same day (nay, it was

said in that same hour,) petitions, very numerously signed, and various

petitions from different ranks, different ages, different sexes, were

carried up to the throne, praying, upon manifold grounds, but all

noticing the extreme doubtfulness of the case, for an unconditional

pardon. By whose advice or influence, it was guessed easily, though

never exactly ascertained, these petitions were unanimously, almost

contemptuously rejected. And to express the contempt of public opinion

as powerfully as possible, Agnes was sentenced by the court,

reassembled in full pomp, order, and ceremonial costume, to a

punishment the severest that the laws allowed--viz. hard labor for ten

years. The people raged more than ever; threats public and private were

conveyed to the ears of the minister chiefly concerned in the

responsibility, and who had indeed, by empty and ostentatious talking,

assumed that responsibility to himself in a way that was perfectly

needless.

Thus stood matters when I awoke to consciousness: and this was the

fatal journal of the interval--interval so long as measured by my

fierce calendar of delirium--so brief measured by the huge circuit of

events which it embraced, and their mightiness for evil. Wrath, wrath

immeasurable, unimaginable, unmitigable, burned at my heart like a

cancer. The worst had come. And the thing which kills a man for action

--the living in two climates at once--a torrid and a frigid zone--of

hope and fear--that was past. Weak--suppose I were for the moment: I

felt that a day or two might bring back my strength. No miserable

tremors of hope _now_ shook my nerves: if they shook from that

inevitable rocking of the waters that follows a storm, so much might be

pardoned to the infirmity of a nature that could not lay aside its

fleshly necessities, nor altogether forego its homage to 'these frail

elements,' but which by inspiration already lived within a region where

no voices were heard but the spiritual voices of transcendent passions

--of

'Wrongs unrevenged, and insults unredress'd.'

Six days from that time I was well--well and strong. I rose from bed; I

bathed; I dressed; dressed as if I were a bridegroom. And that

_was_ in fact a great day in my life. I was to see Agnes. Oh! yes:

permission had been obtained from the lordly minister that I should see

my wife. Is it possible? Can such condescensions exist? Yes:

solicitations from ladies, eloquent notes wet with ducal tears, these

had won from the thrice-radiant secretary, redolent of roseate attar, a

countersign to some order or other, by which I--yes I--under license of

a fop, and supervision of a jailer--was to see and for a time to

converse with my own wife.

The hour appointed for the first day's interview was eight o'clock in

the evening. On the outside of the jail all was summer light and

animation. The sports of children in the streets of mighty cities are

but sad, and too painfully recall the circumstances of freedom and

breezy nature that are not there. But still the pomp of glorious

summer, and the presence, 'not to be put by,' of the everlasting light,

that is either always present, or always dawning--these potent elements

impregnate the very city life, and the dim reflex of nature which is

found at the bottom of well-like streets, with more solemn powers to

move and to soothe in summer. I struck upon the prison gates, the first

among multitudes waiting to strike. Not because we struck, but because

the hour had sounded, suddenly the gate opened; and in we streamed. I,

as a visitor for the first time, was immediately distinguished by the

jailers, whose glance of the eye is fatally unerring. 'Who was it that

I wanted?' At the name a stir of emotion was manifest, even there: the

dry bones stirred and moved: the passions outside had long ago passed

to the interior of this gloomy prison: and not a man but had his

hypothesis on the case; not a man but had almost fought with some

comrade (many had literally fought) about the merits of their several

opinions.

If any man had expected a scene at this reunion, he would have been

disappointed. Exhaustion, and the ravages of sorrow, had left to dear

Agnes so little power of animation or of action, that her emotions were

rather to be guessed at, both for kind and for degree, than directly to

have been perceived. She was in fact a sick patient, far gone in an

illness that should properly have confined her to bed; and was as much

past the power of replying to my frenzied exclamations, as a dying

victim of fever of entering upon a strife of argument. In bed, however,

she was not. When the door opened she was discovered sitting at a table

placed against the opposite wall, her head pillowed upon her arms, and

these resting upon the table. Her beautiful long auburn hair had

escaped from its confinement, and was floating over the table and her

own person. She took no notice of the disturbance made by our entrance,

did not turn, did not raise her head, nor make an effort to do so, nor

by any sign whatever intimate that she was conscious of our presence,

until the turnkey in a respectful tone announced me. Upon that a low

groan, or rather a feeble moan, showed that she had become aware of my

presence, and relieved me from all apprehension of causing too sudden a

shock by taking her in my arms. The turnkey had now retired; we were

alone. I knelt by her side, threw my arms about her, and pressed her to

my heart. She drooped her head upon my shoulder, and lay for some time

like one who slumbered; but, alas! not as she had used to slumber. Her

breathing, which had been like that of sinless infancy, was now

frightfully short and quick; she seemed not properly to breathe, but to

gasp. This, thought I, may be sudden agitation, and in that case she

will gradually recover; half an hour will restore her. Wo is me! she

did _not_ recover; and internally I said--she never _will_

recover. The arrows have gone too deep for a frame so exquisite in its

sensibility, and already her hours are numbered.

At this first visit I said nothing to her about the past; _that_,

and the whole extent to which our communications should go, I left

rather to her own choice. At the second visit, however, upon some word

or other arising which furnished an occasion for touching on this

hateful topic, I pressed her, contrary to my own previous intention,

for as full an account of the fatal event as she could without a

distressing effort communicate. To my surprise she was silent--

gloomily--almost it might have seemed obstinately silent. A horrid

thought came into my mind; could it, might it have been possible that

my noble-minded wife, such she had ever seemed to me, was open to

temptations of this nature? Could it have been that in some moment of

infirmity, when her better angel was away from her side, she had

yielded to a sudden impulse of frailty, such as a second moment for

consideration would have resisted, but which unhappily had been

followed by no such opportunity of retrieval? I had heard of such

things. Cases there were in our own times (and not confined to one

nation), when irregular impulses of this sort were known to have

haunted and besieged natures not otherwise ignoble and base. I ran over

some of the names amongst those which were taxed with this propensity.

More than one were the names of people in a technical sense held noble.

That, nor any other consideration abated my horror. Better, I said,

better, (because more compatible with elevation of mind,) better to

have committed some bloody act--some murderous act. Dreadful was the

panic I underwent. God pardon the wrong I did; and even now I pray to

him--as though the past thing were a future thing and capable of

change--that he would forbid her for ever to know what was the

derogatory thought I had admitted. I sometimes think, by recollecting a

momentary blush that suffused her marble countenance,--I think--I fear

that she might have read what was fighting in my mind. Yet that would

admit of another explanation. If she did read the very worst, meek

saint! she suffered no complaint or sense of that injury to escape her.

It might, however, be that perception, or it might be that fear which

roused her to an effort that otherwise had seemed too revolting to

undertake. She now rehearsed the whole steps of the affair from first

to last; but the only material addition, which her narrative made to

that which the trial itself had involved, was the following:--On two

separate occasions previous to the last and fatal one, when she had

happened to walk unaccompanied by me in the city, the monster Barratt

had met her in the street. He had probably--and this was, indeed,

subsequently ascertained--at first, and for some time afterwards,

mistaken her rank, and had addressed some proposals to her, which, from

the suppressed tone of his speaking, or from her own terror and

surprise, she had not clearly understood; but enough had reached her

alarmed ear to satisfy her that they were of a nature in the last

degree licentious and insulting. Terrified and shocked rather than

indignant, for she too easily presumed the man to be a maniac, she

hurried homewards; and was rejoiced, on first venturing to look round

when close to her own gate, to perceive that the man was not following.

There, however, she was mistaken; for either on this occasion, or on

some other, he had traced her homewards. The last of these rencontres

had occurred just three months before the fatal 6th of April; and if,

in any one instance, Agnes had departed from the strict line of her

duty as a wife, or had shown a defect of judgment, it was at this

point--in not having frankly and fully reported the circumstances to

me. On the last of these occasions I had met her at the garden-gate,

and had particularly remarked that she seemed agitated; and now, at

recalling these incidents, Agnes reminded me that I had noticed that

circumstance to herself, and that she had answered me faithfully as to

the main fact. It was true she had done so; for she had said that she

had just met a lunatic who had alarmed her by fixing his attention upon

herself, and speaking to her in a ruffian manner; and it was also true

that she did sincerely regard him in that light. This led me at the

time to construe the whole affair into a casual collision with some

poor maniac escaping from his keepers, and of no future moment, having

passed by without present consequences. But had she, instead of thus

reporting her own erroneous impression, reported the entire

circumstances of the case, I should have given them a very different

interpretation. Affection for me, and fear to throw me needlessly into

a quarrel with a man of apparently brutal and violent nature--these

considerations, as too often they do with the most upright wives, had

operated to check Agnes in the perfect sincerity of her communications.

She had told nothing _but_ the truth--only, and fatally it turned

out for us both, she had not told the _whole_ truth. The very

suppression, to which she had reconciled herself, under the belief that

thus she was providing for my safety and her own consequent happiness,

had been the indirect occasion of ruin to both. It was impossible to

show displeasure under such circumstances, or under any circumstances,

to one whose self-reproaches were at any rate too bitter; but

certainly, as a general rule, every conscientious woman should resolve

to consider her husband's honor in the first case, and far before all

other regards whatsoever; to make this the first, the second, the third

law of her conduct, and his personal safety but the fourth or fifth.

Yet women, and especially when the interests of children are at stake

upon their husbands' safety, rarely indeed are able to take this Roman

view of their duties.

To return to the narrative. Agnes had not, nor could have, the most

remote suspicion of this Barratt's connection with the shop which he

had not accidentally entered; and the sudden appearance of this wretch

it was, at the very moment of finding herself charged with so vile and

degrading an offence, that contributed most of all to rob her of her

natural firmness, by suddenly revealing to her terrified heart the

depth of the conspiracy which thus yawned like a gulf below her. And

not only had this sudden horror, upon discovering a guilty design in

what before had seemed accident, and links uniting remote incidents

which else seemed casual and disconnected, greatly disturbed and

confused her manner, which confusion again had become more intense upon

her own consciousness that she _was_ confused, and that her manner

was greatly to her disadvantage; but--which was the worst effect of

all, because the rest could not operate against her, except upon those

who were present to witness it, whereas this was noted down and

recorded--so utterly did her confusion strip her of all presence of

mind, that she did not consciously notice (and consequently could not

protest against at the moment when it was most important to do so, and

most natural) the important circumstance of the muff. This capital

objection, therefore, though dwelt upon and improved to the utmost at

the trial, was looked upon by the judges as an after-thought; and

merely because it had not been seized upon by herself, and urged in the

first moments of her almost incapacitating terror on finding this

amongst the circumstances of the charge against her--as if an ingenuous

nature, in the very act of recoiling with horror from a criminal charge

the most degrading, and in the very instant of discovering, with a

perfect rapture of alarm, the too plausible appearance of probability

amongst the circumstances, would be likely to pause, and with attorney-

like dexterity, to pick out the particular circumstance that might

admit of being _proved_ to be false, when the conscience

proclaimed, though in despondence for the result, that all the

circumstances were, as to the use made of them, one tissue of

falsehoods. Agnes, who had made a powerful effort in speaking of the

case at all, found her calmness increase as she advanced; and she now

told me, that in reality there were two discoveries which she made in

the same instant, and not one only, which had disarmed her firmness and

ordinary presence of mind. One I have mentioned--the fact of Barratt,

the proprietor of the shop, being the same person who had in former

instances persecuted her in the street; but the other was even more

alarming--it has been said already that it was _not_ a pure matter

of accident that she had visited this particular shop. In reality, that

nursery-maid, of whom some mention has been made above, and in terms

expressing the suspicion with which even then I regarded her, had

persuaded her into going thither by some representations which Agnes

had already ascertained to be altogether unwarranted. Other

presumptions against this girl's fidelity crowded dimly upon my wife's

mind at the very moment of finding her eyes thus suddenly opened. And

it was not five minutes after her first examination, and in fact five

minutes after it had ceased to be of use to her, that she remembered

another circumstance which now, when combined with the sequel, told its

own tale,--the muff had been missed some little time before the 6th of

April. Search had been made for it; but, the particular occasion which

required it having passed off, this search was laid aside for the

present, in the expectation that it would soon reappear in some corner

of the house before it was wanted: then came the sunny day, which made

it no longer useful, and would perhaps have dismissed it entirely from

the recollection of all parties, until it was now brought back in this

memorable way. The name of my wife was embroidered within, upon the

lining, and it thus became a serviceable link to the hellish cabal

against her. Upon reviewing the circumstances from first to last, upon

recalling the manner of the girl at the time when the muff was missed,

and upon combining the whole with her recent deception, by which she

had misled her poor mistress into visiting this shop, Agnes began to

see the entire truth as to this servant's wicked collusion with

Barratt, though, perhaps, it might be too much to suppose her aware of

the unhappy result to which her collusion tended. All this she saw at a

glance when it was too late, for her first examination was over. This

girl, I must add, had left our house during my illness, and she had

afterwards a melancholy end.

One thing surprised me in all this. Barratt's purpose must manifestly

have been to create merely a terror in my poor wife's mind, and to stop

short of any legal consequences, in order to profit of that panic and

confusion for extorting compliances with his hideous pretensions. It

perplexed me, therefore, that he did not appear to have pursued this

manifestly his primary purpose, the other being merely a mask to

conceal his true ends, and also (as he fancied) a means for effecting

them. In this, however, I had soon occasion to find that I was

deceived. He had, but without the knowledge of Agnes, taken such steps

as were then open to him, for making overtures to her with regard to

the terms upon which he would agree to defeat the charge against her by

failing to appear. But the law had travelled too fast for him, and too

determinately; so that, by the time he supposed terror to have operated

sufficiently in favor of his views, it had already become unsafe to

venture upon such explicit proposals as he would otherwise have tried.

His own safety was now at stake, and would have been compromised by any

open or written avowal of the motives on which he had been all along

acting. In fact, at this time he was foiled by the agent in whom he

confided; but much more he had been confounded upon another point--the

prodigious interest manifested by the public. Thus it seems--that,

whilst he meditated only a snare for my poor Agnes, he had prepared one

for himself; and finally, to evade the suspicions which began to arise

powerfully as to his true motives, and thus to stave off his own ruin,

had found himself in a manner obliged to go forward and consummate the

ruin of another.

* * * * *

The state of Agnes, as to health and bodily strength, was now becoming

such that I was forcibly warned--whatsoever I meditated doing, to do

quickly. There was this urgent reason for alarm: once conveyed into

that region of the prison in which sentences like hers were executed,

it became hopeless that I could communicate with her again. All

intercourse whatsoever, and with whomsoever, was then placed under the

most rigorous interdict; and the alarming circumstance was, that this

transfer was governed by no settled rules, but might take place at any

hour, and would certainly be precipitated by the slightest violence on

my part, the slightest indiscretion, or the slightest argument for

suspicion. Hard indeed was the part I had to play, for it was

indispensable that I should appear calm and tranquil, in order to

disarm suspicions around me, whilst continually contemplating the

possibility that I myself might be summoned to extremities which I

could not so much as trust myself to name or distinctly to conceive.

But thus stood the case: the Government, it was understood, angered by

the public opposition, resolute for the triumph of what they called

'principle,' had settled finally that the sentence should be carried

into execution. Now that she, that my Agnes, being the frail wreck that

she had become, could have stood one week of this sentence practically

and literally enforced--was a mere chimera. A few hours probably of the

experiment would have settled that question by dismissing her to the

death she longed for; but because the suffering would be short, was I

to stand by and to witness the degradation--the pollution--attempted to

be fastened upon her. What! to know that her beautiful tresses would be

shorn ignominiously--a felon's dress forced upon her--a vile taskmaster

with authority to----; blistered be the tongue that could go on to

utter, in connection with her innocent name, the vile dishonors which

were to settle upon her person! I, however, and her brother had taken

such resolutions that this result was one barely possible; and yet I

sickened (yes, literally I many times experienced the effect of

physical sickness) at contemplating our own utter childish

helplessness, and recollecting that every night during our seclusion

from the prison the last irreversible step might be taken--and in the

morning we might find a solitary cell, and the angel form that had

illuminated it gone where we could not follow, and leaving behind her

the certainty that we should see her no more. Every night, at the hour

of locking up, _she_, at least, manifestly had a fear that she saw

us for the last time; she put her arms feebly about my neck, sobbed

convulsively, and, I believe, guessed--but, if really so, did not much

reprove or quarrel with the desperate purposes which I struggled with

in regard to her own life. One thing was quite evident--that to the

peace of her latter days, now hurrying to their close, it was

indispensable that she should pass them undivided from me; and

possibly, as was afterwards alleged, when it became easy to allege any

thing, some relenting did take place in high quarters at this time; for

upon some medical reports made just now, a most seasonable indulgence

was granted, viz. that Hannah was permitted to attend her mistress

constantly; and it was also felt as a great alleviation of the horrors

belonging to this prison, that candles were now allowed throughout the

nights. But I was warned privately that these indulgences were with no

consent from the police minister; and that circumstances might soon

withdraw the momentary intercession by which we profited. With this

knowledge, we could not linger in our preparations; we had resolved

upon accomplishing an escape for Agnes, at whatever risk or price; the

main difficulty was her own extreme feebleness, which might forbid her

to co-operate with us in any degree at the critical moment; and the

main danger was--delay. We pushed forward, therefore, in our attempts

with prodigious energy, and I for my part with an energy like that of

insanity.

* * * * *

The first attempt we made was upon the fidelity to his trust of the

chief jailer. He was a coarse, vulgar man, brutal in his manners, but

with vestiges of generosity in his character--though damaged a good

deal by his daily associates. Him we invited to a meeting at a tavern

in the neighborhood of the prison, disguising our names as too certain

to betray our objects, and baiting our invitation with some hints which

we had ascertained were likely to prove temptations under his immediate

circumstances. He had a graceless young son whom he was most anxious to

wean from his dissolute connections, and to steady, by placing him in

some office of no great responsibility. Upon this knowledge we framed

the terms of our invitation.

These proved to be effectual, as regarded our immediate object of

obtaining an interview of persuasion. The night was wet; and at seven

o'clock, the hour fixed for the interview, we were seated in readiness,

much perplexed to know whether he would take any notice of our

invitation. We had waited three quarters of an hour, when we heard a

heavy lumbering step ascending the stair. The door was thrown open to

its widest extent, and in the centre of the door-way stood a short

stout-built man, and the very broadest I ever beheld--staring at us

with bold inquiring eyes. His salutation was something to this effect.

'What the hell do you gay fellows want with me? What the blazes is this

humbugging letter about? My son, and be hanged! What do you know of my

son?'

Upon this overture we ventured to request that he would come in and

suffer us to shut the door, which we also locked. Next we produced the

official paper nominating his son to a small place in the customs,--

not yielding much, it was true, in the way of salary, but fortunately,

and in accordance with the known wishes of the father, unburdened with

any dangerous trust.

'Well, I suppose I must say thank ye: but what comes next? What am I to

do to pay the damages?' We informed him that for this particular little

service we asked no return.

'No, no,' said he, 'that'll not go down: that cat'll not jump. I'm not

green enough for that. So, say away--what's the damage?' We then

explained that we had certainly a favor and a great one to ask: ['Ay,

I'll be bound you have,' was his parenthesis:] but that for this we

were prepared to offer a separate remuneration; repeating that with

respect to the little place procured for his son, it had not cost us

anything, and therefore we did really and sincerely decline to receive

anything in return; satisfied that, by this little offering, we had

procured the opportunity of this present interview. At this point we

withdrew a covering from the table upon which we had previously

arranged a heap of gold coins, amounting in value to twelve hundred

English guineas: this being the entire sum which circumstances allowed

us to raise on so sudden a warning: for some landed property that we

both had was so settled and limited, that we could not convert it into

money either by way of sale, loan, or mortgage. This sum, stating to

him its exact amount, we offered to his acceptance, upon the single

condition that he would look aside, or wink hard, or (in whatever way

he chose to express it) would make, or suffer to be made, such

facilities for our liberating a female prisoner as we would point out.

He mused: full five minutes he sat deliberating without opening his

lips. At length he shocked us by saying, in a firm, decisive tone, that

left us little hope of altering his resolution,--'No: gentlemen, it's a

very fair offer, and a good deal of money for a single prisoner. I

think I can guess at the person. It's a fair offer--fair enough. But,

bless your heart! if I were to do the thing you want--why perhaps

another case might be overlooked: but this prisoner, no: there's too

much depending. No, they would turn me out of my place. Now the place

is worth more to me in the long run than what you offer: though you bid

fair enough, if it were only for my time in it. But look here: in case

I can get my son to come into harness, I'm expecting to get the office

for him after I've retired. So I can't do it. But I'll tell you what:

you've been kind to my son: and therefore I'll not say a word about it.

You're safe for me. And so good-night to you.' Saying which, and

standing no further question, he walked resolutely out of the room and

down stairs.

Two days we mourned over this failure, and scarcely knew which way to

turn for another ray of hope;--on the third morning we received

intelligence that this very jailer had been attacked by the fever,

which, after long desolating the city, had at length made its way into

the prison. In a very few days the jailer was lying without hope of

recovery: and of necessity another person was appointed to fill his

station for the present. This person I had seen, and I liked him less

by much than the one he succeeded: he had an Italian appearance, and he

wore an air of Italian subtlety and dissimulation. I was surprised to

find, on proposing the same service to him, and on the same terms, that

he made no objection whatever, but closed instantly with my offers. In

prudence, however, I had made this change in the articles: a sum equal

to two hundred English guineas, or one-sixth part of the whole money,

he was to receive beforehand as a retaining fee; but the remainder was

to be paid only to himself, or to anybody of his appointing, at the

very moment of our finding the prison gates thrown open to us. He spoke

fairly enough, and seemed to meditate no treachery; nor was there any

obvious or known interest to serve by treachery; and yet I doubted him

grievously.

The night came: it was chosen as a gala night, one of two nights

throughout the year in which the prisoners were allowed to celebrate a

great national event: and in those days of relaxed prison management

the utmost license was allowed to the rejoicing. This indulgence was

extended to prisoners of all classes, though, of course, under more

restrictions with regard to the criminal class. Ten o'clock came--the

hour at which we had been instructed to hold ourselves in readiness. We

had been long prepared. Agnes had been dressed by Hannah in such a

costume externally (a man's hat and cloak, &c.) that, from her height,

she might easily have passed amongst a mob of masquerading figures in

the debtors' halls and galleries for a young stripling. Pierpoint and

myself were also to a certain degree disguised; so far, at least, that

we should not have been recognized at any hurried glance by those of

the prison officers who had become acquainted with our persons. We were

all more or less disguised about the face; and in that age when masks

were commonly used at all hours by people of a certain rank, there

would have been nothing suspicious in any possible costume of the kind

in a night like this, if we could succeed in passing for friends of

debtors.

I am impatient of these details, and I hasten over the ground. One

entire hour passed away, and no jailer appeared. We began to despond

heavily; and Agnes, poor thing! was now the most agitated of us all. At

length eleven struck in the harsh tones of the prison-clock. A few

minutes after, we heard the sound of bolts drawing, and bars

unfastening. The jailer entered--drunk, and much disposed to be

insolent. I thought it advisable to give him another bribe, and he

resumed the fawning insinuation of his manner. He now directed us, by

passages which he pointed out, to gain the other side of the prison.

There we were to mix with the debtors and their mob of friends, and to

await his joining us, which in that crowd he could do without much

suspicion. He wished us to traverse the passages separately; but this

was impossible, for it was necessary that one of us should support

Agnes on each side. I previously persuaded her to take a small quantity

of brandy, which we rejoiced to see had given her, at this moment of

starting, a most seasonable strength and animation. The gloomy passages

were more than usually empty, for all the turnkeys were employed in a

vigilant custody of the gates, and examination of the parties going

out. So the jailer had told us, and the news alarmed us. We came at

length to a turning which brought us in sight of a strong iron gate,

that divided the two main quarters of the prison. For this we had not

been prepared. The man, however, opened the gate without a word spoken,

only putting out his hand for a fee; and in my joy, perhaps, I gave him

one imprudently large. After passing this gate, the distant uproar of

the debtors guided us to the scene of their merriment; and when there,

such was the tumult and the vast multitude assembled, that we now hoped

in good earnest to accomplish our purpose without accident. Just at

this moment the jailer appeared in the distance; he seemed looking

towards us, and at length one of our party could distinguish that he

was beckoning to us. We went forward, and found him in some agitation,

real or counterfeit. He muttered a word or two quite unintelligible

about the man at the wicket, told us we must wait a while, and he would

then see what could be done for us. We were beginning to demur, and to

express the suspicions which now too seriously arose, when he, seeing,

or affecting to see some object of alarm, pushed us with a hurried

movement into a cell opening upon the part of the gallery at which we

were now standing. Not knowing whether we really might not be

retreating from some danger, we could do no otherwise than comply with

his signals; but we were troubled at finding ourselves immediately

locked in from the outside, and thus apparently all our motions had

only sufficed to exchange one prison for another.

We were now completely in the dark, and found, by a hard breathing from

one corner of the little dormitory, that it was not unoccupied. Having

taken care to provide ourselves separately with means for striking a

light, we soon had more than one torch burning. The brilliant light

falling upon the eyes of a man who lay stretched on the iron bedstead,

woke him. It proved to be my friend the under-jailer, Ratcliffe, but no

longer holding any office in the prison. He sprang up, and a rapid

explanation took place. He had become a prisoner for debt; and on this

evening, after having caroused through the day with some friends from

the country, had retired at an early hour to sleep away his

intoxication. I on my part thought it prudent to intrust him

unreservedly with our situation and purposes, not omitting our gloomy

suspicions. Ratcliffe looked, with a pity that won my love, upon the

poor wasted Agnes. He had seen her on her first entrance into the

prison, had spoken to her, and therefore knew _from_ what she had

fallen, _to_ what. Even then he had felt for her; how much more at

this time, when he beheld, by the fierce light of the torches, her wo-

worn features!

'Who was it,' he asked eagerly, 'you made the bargain with? Manasseh?'

'The same.'

'Then I can tell you this--not a greater villain walks the earth. He is

a Jew from Portugal; he has betrayed many a man, and will many another,

unless he gets his own neck stretched, which might happen, if I told

all I know.'

'But what was it probable that this man meditated? Or how could it

profit him to betray us?'

'That's more than I can tell. He wants to get your money, and that he

doesn't know how to bring about without doing his part. But that's what

he never _will_ do, take my word for it. That would cut him out of

all chance for the head-jailer's place.' He mused a little, and then

told us that he could himself put us outside the prison walls, and

_would_ do it without fee or reward. 'But we must be quiet, or

that devil will bethink him of me. I'll wager something he thought that

I was out merry-making like the rest; and if he should chance to light

upon the truth, he'll be back in no time.' Ratcliffe then removed an

old fire-grate, at the back of which was an iron plate, that swung

round into a similar fire-place in the contiguous cell. From that, by a

removal of a few slight obstacles, we passed, by a long avenue, into

the chapel. Then he left us, whilst he went out alone to reconnoitre

his ground. Agnes was now in so pitiable a condition of weakness, as we

stood on the very brink of our final effort, that we placed her in a

pew, where she could rest as upon a sofa. Previously we had stood upon

graves, and with monuments more or less conspicuous all around us: some

raised by friends to the memory of friends--some by subscriptions in

the prison--some by children, who had risen into prosperity, to the

memory of a father, brother, or other relative, who had died in

captivity. I was grieved that these sad memorials should meet the eye

of my wife at this moment of awe and terrific anxiety. Pierpoint and I

were well armed, and all of us determined not to suffer a recapture,

now that we were free of the crowds that made resistance hopeless. This

Agnes easily perceived; and _that_, by suggesting a bloody

arbitration, did not lessen her agitation. I hoped therefore, that, by

placing her in the pew, I might at least liberate her for the moment

from the besetting memorials of sorrow and calamity. But, as if in the

very teeth of my purpose, one of the large columns which supported the

roof of the chapel, had its basis and lower part of the shaft in this

very pew. On the side of it, and just facing her as she lay reclining

on the cushions, appeared a mural tablet, with a bas-relief in white

marble, to the memory of two children, twins, who had lived and died at

the same time, and in this prison--children who had never breathed

another air than that of captivity, their parents having passed many

years within these walls, under confinement for debt. The sculptures

were not remarkable, being a trite, but not the less affecting,

representation of angels descending to receive the infants; but the

hallowed words of the inscription, distinct and legible--'Suffer little

children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the

kingdom of God'--met her eye, and, by the thoughts they awakened, made

me fear that she would become unequal to the exertions which yet

awaited her. At this moment Ratcliffe returned, and informed us that

all was right; and that, from the ruinous state of all the buildings

which surrounded the chapel, no difficulty remained for us, who were,

in fact, beyond the strong part of the prison, excepting at a single

door, which we should be obliged to break down. But had we any means

arranged for pursuing our flight, and turning this escape to account

when out of confinement? All that, I assured him, was provided for long

ago. We proceeded, and soon reached the door. We had one crow-bar

amongst us, but beyond that had no better weapons than the loose stones

found about some new-made graves in the chapel. Ratcliffe and

Pierpoint, both powerful men, applied themselves by turns to the door,

whilst Hannah and I supported Agnes. The door did not yield, being of

enormous strength; but the wall did, and a large mass of stone-work

fell outwards, twisting the door aside; so that, by afterwards working

with our hands, we removed stones many enough to admit of our egress.

Unfortunately this aperture was high above the ground, and it was

necessary to climb over a huge heap of loose rubbish in order to profit

by it. My brother-in-law passed first in order to receive my wife,

quite helpless at surmounting the obstacle by her own efforts, out of

my arms. He had gone through the opening, and, turning round so as to

face me, he naturally could see something that I did _not_ see.

'Look behind!' he called out rapidly. I did so, and saw the murderous

villain Manasseh with his arm uplifted, and in the act of cutting at my

wife, nearly insensible as she was, with a cutlass. The blow was not

for me, but for her, as the fugitive prisoner; and the law would have

borne him out in the act. I saw, I comprehended the whole. I groped, as

far as I could without letting my wife drop, for my pistols; but all

that I could do would have been unavailing, and too late--she would

have been murdered in my arms. But--and that was what none of us saw--

neither I, nor Pierpoint, nor the hound Manasseh--one person stood

back in the shade; one person had seen, but had not uttered a word on

seeing Manasseh advancing through the shades; one person only had

forecast the exact succession of all that was coming; me she saw

embarrassed and my hands preoccupied--Pierpoint and Ratcliffe useless

by position--and the gleam of the dog's eye directed her to his aim.

The crow-bar was leaning against the shattered wall. This she had

silently seized. One blow knocked up the sword; a second laid the

villain prostrate. At this moment appeared another of the turnkeys

advancing from the rear, for the noise of our assault upon the door had

drawn attention in the interior of the prison, from which, however, no

great number of assistants could on this dangerous night venture to

absent themselves. What followed for the next few minutes hurried

onwards, incident crowding upon incident, like the motions of a dream:

--Manasseh, lying on the ground, yelled out, 'The bell! the bell!' to

him who followed. The man understood, and made for the belfry-door

attached to the chapel; upon which Pierpoint drew a pistol, and sent

the bullet whizzing past his ear so truly, that fear made the man

obedient to the counter-orders of Pierpoint for the moment. He paused

and awaited the issue. In a moment had all cleared the wall, traversed

the waste ground beyond it, lifted Agnes over the low railing, shaken

hands with our benefactor Ratcliffe, and pushed onwards as rapidly as

we were able to the little dark lane, a quarter of a mile distant,

where had stood waiting for the last two hours a chaise-and-four.

[Ratcliffe, before my story closes, I will pursue to the last of my

acquaintance with him, according to the just claims of his services. He

had privately whispered to me, as we went along, that he could speak to

the innocence of that lady, pointing to my wife, better than anybody.

He was the person whom (as then holding an office in the prison)

Barratt had attempted to employ as agent in conveying any messages that

he found it safe to send--obscurely hinting the terms on which he would

desist from prosecution. Ratcliffe had at first undertaken the

negotiation from mere levity of character. But when the story and the

public interest spread, and after himself becoming deeply struck by the

prisoner's affliction, beauty, and reputed innocence, he had pursued it

only as a means of entrapping Barratt into such written communications

and such private confessions of the truth as might have served Agnes

effectually. He wanted the art, however, to disguise his purposes:

Barratt came to suspect him violently, and feared his evidence so far,

even for those imperfect and merely oral overtures which he had really

sent through Ratcliffe--that on the very day of the trial, he, as was

believed, though by another nominally, contrived that Ratcliffe should

be arrested for debt; and, after harassing him with intricate forms of

business, had finally caused him to be conveyed to prison. Ratcliffe

was thus involved in his own troubles at the time; and afterwards

supposed that, without written documents to support his evidence, he

could not be of much service to the re-establisment of my wife's

reputation. Six months after his services in the night-escape from the

prison, I saw him, and pressed him to take the money so justly

forfeited to him by Manasseh's perfidy. He would, however, be persuaded

to take no more than paid his debts. A second and a third time his

debts were paid by myself and Pierpoint. But the same habits of

intemperance and dissolute pleasure which led him into these debts,

finally ruined his constitution; and he died, though otherwise of a

fine generous manly nature, a martyr to dissipation at the early age of

twenty-nine. With respect to his prison confinement, it was so

frequently recurring in his life, and was alleviated by so many

indulgences, that he scarcely viewed it as a hardship: having once been

an officer of the prison, and having thus formed connections with the

whole official establishment, and done services to many of them, and

being of so convivial a turn, he was, even as a prisoner, treated with

distinction, and considered as a privileged son of the house.]

It was just striking twelve o'clock as we entered the lane where the

carriage was drawn up. Rain, about the profoundest I had ever

witnessed, was falling. Though near to midsummer, the night had been

unusually dark to begin with, and from the increasing rain had become

much more so. We could see nothing; and at first we feared that some

mistake had occurred as to the station of the carriage--in which case

we might have sought for it vainly through the intricate labyrinth of

the streets in that quarter. I first descried it by the light of a

torch, reflected powerfully from the large eyes of the leaders. All was

ready. Horse-keepers were at the horses' heads. The postilions were

mounted; each door had the steps let down: Agnes was lifted in: Hannah

and I followed: Pierpoint mounted his horse; and at the word--Oh! how

strange a word!--'_All's right_,' the horses sprang off like leopards,

a manner ill-suited to the slippery pavement of a narrow street. At

that moment, but we valued it little indeed, we heard the prison-bell

ringing out loud and clear. Thrice within the first three minutes we

had to pull up suddenly, on the brink of formidable accidents, from the

dangerous speed we maintained, and which, nevertheless, the driver had

orders to maintain, as essential to our plan. All the stoppages and

hinderances of every kind along the road had been anticipated

previously, and met by contrivance, of one kind or other; and Pierpoint

was constantly a little ahead of us to attend to anything that had been

neglected. The consequence of these arrangements was--that no person

along the road could possibly have assisted to trace us by any thing in

our appearance: for we passed all objects at too flying a pace, and

through darkness too profound, to allow of any one feature in our

equipage being distinctly noticed. Ten miles out of town, a space which

we traversed in forty-four minutes, a second relay of horses was ready;

but we carried on the same postilions throughout. Six miles ahead of

this distance we had a second relay; and with this set of horses, after

pushing two miles further along the road, we crossed by a miserable

lane five miles long, scarcely even a bridge road, into another of the

great roads from the capital; and by thus crossing the country, we came

back upon the city at a point far distant from that at which we left

it. We had performed a distance of forty-two miles in three hours, and

lost a fourth hour upon the wretched five miles of cross-road. It was,

therefore, four o'clock, and broad daylight, when we drew near the

suburbs of the city; but a most happy accident now favored us; a fog

the most intense now prevailed; nobody could see an object six feet

distant; we alighted in an uninhabited new-built street, plunged into

the fog, thus confounding our traces to any observer. We then stepped

into a hackney-coach which had been stationed at a little distance.

Thence, according to our plan, we drove to a miserable quarter of the

town, whither the poor only and the wretched resorted; mounted a gloomy

dirty staircase, and, befriended by the fog, still growing thicker and

thicker, and by the early hour of the morning, reached a house

previously hired, which, if shocking to the eye and the imagination

from its squalid appearance and its gloom, still was a home--a

sanctuary--an asylum from treachery, from captivity, from persecution.

Here Pierpoint for the present quitted us: and once more Agnes, Hannah,

and I, the shattered members of a shattered family, were thus gathered

together in a house of our own.

Yes: once again, daughter of the hills, thou sleptst as heretofore in

my encircling arms; but not again in that peace which crowned thy

innocence in those days, and should have crowned it now. Through the

whole of our flying journey, in some circumstances at its outset

strikingly recalling to me that blessed one which followed our

marriage, Agnes slept away unconscious of our movements. She slept

through all that day and the following night; and I watched over her

with as much jealousy of all that might disturb her, as a mother

watches over her new-born baby; for I hoped, I fancied, that a long--

long rest, a rest, a halcyon calm, a deep, deep Sabbath of security,

might prove healing and medicinal. I thought wrong; her breathing

became more disturbed, and sleep was now haunted by dreams; all of us,

indeed, were agitated by dreams; the past pursued me, and the present,

for high rewards had been advertised by Government to those who traced

us; and though for the moment we were secure, because we never went

abroad, and could not have been naturally sought in such a

neighborhood, still that very circumstance would eventually operate

against us. At length, every night I dreamed of our insecurity under a

thousand forms; but more often by far my dreams turned upon our wrongs;

wrath moved me rather than fear. Every night, for the greater part, I

lay painfully and elaborately involved, by deep sense of wrong,

'--in long orations, which I pleaded

Before unjust tribunals.'

[Footnote: From a MS. poem of a great living Poet.]

And for poor Agnes, her also did the remembrance of mighty wrongs

occupy through vast worlds of sleep in the same way--though colored by

that tenderness which belonged to her gentler nature. One dream in

particular--a dream of sublime circumstances--she repeated to me so

movingly, with a pathos so thrilling, that by some profound sympathy it

transplanted itself to my own sleep, settled itself there, and is to

this hour a part of the fixed dream scenery which revolves at intervals

through my sleeping life. This it was:--She would hear a trumpet sound

--though perhaps as having been the prelude to the solemn entry of the

judges at a town which she had once visited in her childhood; other

preparations would follow, and at last all the solemnities of a great

trial would shape themselves and fall into settled images. The audience

was assembled, the judges were arrayed, the court was set. The prisoner

was cited. Inquest was made, witnesses were called; and false witnesses

came tumultuously to the bar. Then again a trumpet was heard, but the

trumpet of a mighty archangel; and then would roll away thick clouds

and vapors. Again the audience, but another audience, was assembled;

again the tribunal was established; again the court was set; but a

tribunal and a court--how different to her! _That_ had been

composed of men seeking indeed for truth, but themselves erring and

fallible creatures; the witnesses had been full of lies, the judges of

darkness. But here was a court composed of heavenly witnesses--here was

a righteous tribunal--and then at last a judge that could not be

deceived. The judge smote with his eye a person who sought to hide

himself in the crowd; the guilty man stepped forward; the poor prisoner

was called up to the presence of the mighty judge; suddenly the voice

of a little child was heard ascending before her. Then the trumpet

sounded once again; and then there were new heavens and a new earth;

and her tears and her agitation (for she had seen her little Francis)

awoke the poor palpitating dreamer.

* * * * *

Two months passed on: nothing could possibly be done materially to

raise the standard of those wretched accommodations which the house

offered. The dilapidated walls, the mouldering plaster, the blackened

mantel-pieces, the stained and polluted wainscots--what could be

attempted to hide or to repair all this by those who durst not venture

abroad? Yet whatever could be done, Hannah did; and, in the mean time,

very soon indeed my Agnes ceased to see or to be offended by these

objects. First of all her sight went from her; and nothing which

appealed to that sense could ever more offend her. It is to me the one

only consolation I have, that my presence and that of Hannah, with such

innocent frauds as we concerted together, made her latter days pass in

a heavenly calm, by persuading her that our security was absolute, and

that all search after us had ceased, under a belief on the part of

Government that we had gained the shelter of a foreign land. All this

was a delusion; but it was a delusion--blessed be Heaven! which lasted

exactly as long as her life, and was just commensurate with its

necessity. I hurry over the final circumstances.

There was fortunately now, even for me, no fear that the hand of any

policeman or emissary of justice could effectually disturb the latter

days of my wife; for, besides pistols always lying loaded in an inner

room, there happened to be a long narrow passage on entering the house,

which, by means of a blunderbuss, I could have swept effectually, and

cleared many times over; and I know what to do in a last extremity.

Just two months it was, to a day, since we had entered the house; and

it happened that the medical attendant upon Agnes, who awakened no

suspicion by his visits, had prescribed some opiate or anodyne which

had not come; being dark early, for it was now September, I had

ventured out to fetch it. In this I conceived there could be no danger.

On my return I saw a man examining the fastenings of the door. He made

no opposition to my entrance, nor seemed much to observe it--but I was

disturbed. Two hours after, both Hannah and I heard a noise about the

door, and voices in low conversation. It is remarkable that Agnes heard

this also--so quick had grown her hearing. She was agitated, but was

easily calmed; and at ten o'clock we were all in bed. The hand of Agnes

was in mine; so only she felt herself in security. She had been

restless for an hour, and talking at intervals in sleep. Once she

certainly wakened, for she pressed her lips to mine. Two minutes after,

I heard something in her breathing which did not please me. I rose

hastily--brought a light--raised her head--two long, long gentle

sighs, that scarcely moved the lips, were all that could be perceived.

At that moment, at that very moment, Hannah called out to me that the

door was surrounded. 'Open it!' I said; six men entered; Agnes it was

they sought; I pointed to the bed; they advanced, gazed, and walked

away in silence.

After this I wandered about, caring little for life or its affairs, and

roused only at times to think of vengeance upon all who had contributed

to lay waste my happiness. In this pursuit, however, I was confounded

as much by my own thoughts as by the difficulties of accomplishing my

purpose. To assault and murder either of the two principal agents in

this tragedy, what would it be, what other effect could it have, than

to invest them with the character of injured and suffering people, and

thus to attract a pity or a forgiveness at least to their persons which

never otherwise could have illustrated their deaths? I remembered,

indeed, the words of a sea-captain who had taken such vengeance as had

offered at the moment upon his bitter enemy and persecutor (a young

passenger on board his ship), who had informed against him at the

Custom-house on his arrival in port, and had thus effected the

confiscation of his ship, and the ruin of the captain's family. The

vengeance, and it was all that circumstances allowed, consisted in

coming behind the young man clandestinely and pushing him into the deep

waters of the dock, when, being unable to swim, he perished by

drowning. 'And the like,' said the captain, when musing on his trivial

vengeance, 'and the like happens to many an honest sailor.' Yes,

thought I, the captain was right. The momentary shock of a pistol-

bullet--what is it? Perhaps it may save the wretch after all from the

pangs of some lingering disease; and then again I shall have the

character of a murderer, if known to have shot him; he will with many

people have no such character, but at worst the character of a man too

harsh (they will say), and possibly mistaken in protecting his

property. And then, if not known as the man who shot him, where is the

shadow even of vengeance? Strange it seemed to me, and passing strange,

that I should be the person to urge arguments in behalf of letting this

man escape. For at one time I had as certainly, as inexorably, doomed

him as ever I took any resolution in my life. But the fact is, and I

began to see it upon closer view, it is not easy by any means to take

an adequate vengeance for any injury beyond a very trivial standard;

and that with common magnanimity one does not care to avenge. Whilst I

was in this mood of mind, still debating with myself whether I should

or should not contaminate my hands with the blood of this monster, and

still unable to shut my eyes upon one fact, viz. that my buried Agnes

could above all things have urged me to abstain from such acts of

violence, too evidently useless, listlessly and scarcely knowing what I

was in quest of, I strayed by accident into a church where a venerable

old man was preaching at the very moment I entered; he was either

delivering as a text, or repeating in the course of his sermon, these

words--'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.' By some

accident also he fixed his eyes upon me at the moment; and this

concurrence with the subject then occupying my thoughts so much

impressed me, that I determined very seriously to review my half-formed

purposes of revenge; and well it was that I did so: for in that same

week an explosion of popular fury brought the life of this wretched

Barratt to a shocking termination, pretty much resembling the fate of

the De Witts in Holland. And the consequences to me were such, and so

full of all the consolation and indemnification which this world could

give me, that I have often shuddered since then at the narrow escape I

had had from myself intercepting this remarkable retribution. The

villain had again been attempting to play off the same hellish scheme

with a beautiful young rustic which had succeeded in the case of my

ill-fated Agnes. But the young woman in this instance had a high, and,

in fact, termagant spirit. Rustic as she was, she had been warned of

the character of the man; everybody, in fact, was familiar with the

recent tragedy. Either her lover or her brother happened to be waiting

for her outside the window. He saw in part the very tricks in the act

of perpetration by which some article or other, meant to be claimed as

stolen property, was conveyed into a parcel she had incautiously laid

down. He heard the charge against her made by Barratt, and seconded by

his creatures--heard her appeal--sprang to her aid--dragged the ruffian

into the street, when in less time than the tale could be told, and

before the police (though tolerably alert) could effectually interpose

for his rescue, the mob had so used or so abused the opportunity they

had long wished for, that he remained the mere disfigured wreck of what

had once been a man, rather than a creature with any resemblance to

humanity. I myself heard the uproar at a distance, and the shouts and

yells of savage exultation; they were sounds I shall never forget,

though I did not at that time know them for what they were, or

understood their meaning. The result, however, to me was something

beyond this, and worthy to have been purchased with my heart's blood.

Barratt still breathed; spite of his mutilations he could speak; he was

rational. One only thing he demanded--it was that his dying confession

might be taken. Two magistrates and a clergyman attended. He gave a

list of those whom he had trepanned, and had failed to trepan, by his

artifices and threats, into the sacrifice of their honor. He expired

before the record was closed, but not before he had placed my wife's

name in the latter list as the one whose injuries in his dying moments

most appalled him. This confession on the following day went into the

hands of the hostile minister, and my revenge was perfect.