It Is Never Too Late to Mend Part 55

Then, seeing by his face that her new acquaintance thought her a madwoman, she added:

"That is, yes! I think I should like to see it a little--a very little--but if I do you must keep close by me, Mr. Fry."

"Why of course I shall keep with you," replied Fry somewhat contemptuously. "No strangers admitted except in company of an officer."

Susan still hung fire.

"But you mustn't go to show me the very wicked ones."

"Why they are all pretty much of a muchness for that."

"I mean the murderers--I couldn't bear such a sight."

"Got none," said Fry sorrowfully; "parted with the last of that sort four months ago--up at eight down at nine you understand, miss."

Happily Susan did not understand this brutal allusion; and, not to show her ignorance, she said nothing, but pa.s.sed to a second stipulation--"And, Mr. Fry, I know the men that set fire to Farmer Dean's ricks are in this jail; I won't see them; they would give me such a turn, for that seems to me the next crime after murder to destroy the crops after the very weather has spared them."

Fry smiled superior; then he said sarcastically:

"Don't you be frightened, some of our lot are beauties; your friend the parson is as fond of some of 'em as a cow is of her calf."

"Oh! then show me those ones." Fry took her to one or two cells.

Whenever he opened a cell door she always clutched him on both ribs, and this tickled Fry, so did her simplicity.

At last he came to Robinson's cell.

"In here there is a sulky chap."

"Oh! then let us go on to the next."

"But this is one his reverence is uncommon fond of," said Fry, with a sneer and a chuckle; so he flung open the door, and if the man had not hung his head Susan would hardly have recognized in his uniform corduroy and close-cropped hair the vulgar Adonis who had sat glittering opposite her at table the last time they met.

After the interview which I have described, Susan gratified Fry by praising the beautiful cleanliness of the prison, and returned, leaving a pleasant impression even on this rough hide and "Uncle Tom" behind her.

When she got home she found her patient calm but languid.

While she was relating her encounter with Robinson, and her previous acquaintance with him, the knock of a born fool at a sick man's door made them all start. It was Rutila, with a long letter bearing an ample seal.

Mr. Eden took it with brightening eye, read it, and ground it almost convulsively in his hand. "a.s.ses!" cried he; but the next moment he groaned and bowed his head. Her majesty's secretary's secretary's secretary had written to tell him that his appeal for an inquiry had traveled out of the regular course; it ought to have been made in the first instance to the visiting justices, whose business it was to conduct such inquiries, and that it lay with these visiting justices to apply to the Home Office for an extraordinary inquiry if they found they could not deal with the facts in the usual way. The office, therefore, had sent copies of his memorial to each of the visiting justices, who at their next inspection of the jail would examine into the alleged facts, and had been requested to insert the results in their periodical report.

Mr. Eden sat up in bed, his eye glittering. "Bring me my writing-desk."

It was put on the bed before him, but with many kind injunctions not to worry himself. He promised faithfully. He wrote to the Home Office in this style:

"A question of life and death cannot be played with as you have inconsiderately proposed; nor can a higher jurisdiction transfer an appeal to a lower one without the appellant's consent. Such a course is still more out of order when the higher judge is a salaried servant of the State and the lower ones are amateurs. This was so self-evident that I did not step out of the direct line to cast reflections upon unpaid servants. You have not seen what is self-evident--you drive me, therefore, to explanations.

"I offered you evidence that this jailer is a felon, who has hoodwinked the visiting justices and has deceived you. But between you and the justices is this essential difference: they have been hoodwinked in spite of their own eyes, their own ears, and contact with that ma.s.s of living and dying evidence, the prisoners. You have been deceived without a single opportunity of learning the truth.

"Therefore I appealed, and do appeal, not to convicted incompetency, but to those whose incompetency remains to be proved. Perhaps you will understand me better if I put it thus: I still accuse the jailer of more than a hundred felonious a.s.saults upon prisoners, of attacks upon their lives by physical torture, by hunger, thirst, preposterous confinement in dark dungeons, and other illegal practices; and I now advance another step and accuse the visiting justices of gross dereliction of their duty, of neglecting to ascertain the real practice of the jailer in some points, and in others of encouraging, aiding and abetting him in open violations of the prison rules printed and issued by Act of Parliament.

Of these rules, which are the jail code, I send you a copy. I note the practices of the jail by the side of the rules of the jail. By comparing the two you may calculate the amount of lawless cruelty perpetrated here in each single day; then ask yourself whether an honest man who is on the spot can wait four or five months till justice, crippled by routine, comes hobbling instead of sweeping to their relief.

"For Heaven's sake, bring to bear upon a matter vital to the State one-half the intelligence, zeal and sense of responsibility you will throw this evening into some ambiguous question of fleeting policy of speculative finance. Here are one hundred and eighty souls to whose correction, cure and protection the State is pledged. No one of all these lives is safe a single day. In six weeks I have saved two lives that were gone but for me. I am now sick and enfeebled by the exertions I have had to make to save lives, and am in no condition to arrest the progress of destruction. I tell you that more lives will fall if you do not come to my aid at once! and for every head that falls from this hour I hold you responsible to G.o.d and the State.

"If I fail to prove my several accusations, as a matter of course I shall be dismissed from my office deservedly; and this personal risk ent.i.tles me not only to pet.i.tion for, but to demand an inquiry into the practice of ---- Jail. And in the queen's name, whose salaried servant I am, I do demand it on the instant and on the spot."

Thus did flesh and blood address gutta-percha.

The excitement of writing this letter did the patient no good. A reaction came, and that night his kind nurses were seriously alarmed about him. They sent for the surgeon, who felt his pulse and his skin and looked grave. However, he told them there was no immediate danger, and wrote a fresh prescription.

The patient would eat nothing but bread and water and gruel; but he took all the doctor's medicines, which were raking ones; only at each visit and prescription he cross-examined him as to what effect he hoped to produce by his prescription, and compared the man's expectations with the result.

This process soon brought him to the suspicion that in his case Aesculapius's science was guess-work. But we go on hoping and hoping something from traditional remedies, even when they fail and fail and fail before our eyes.

He was often light-headed, and vented schemes of charity and benevolence ludicrous by their unearthly grandeur. One day he was more than light-headed--he was delirious, and frightened his kind nurses; and to this delirium succeeded great feebleness, and this day for the first time Susan made up her mind that it was Heaven's will earth should lose this man, of whom, in truth, earth was scarce worthy. She came to his side and said tenderly,

"Let me do something for you. Shall I read to you, or sing you a hymn?"

Her voice had often soothed and done him good. "Tell me what I can do for you!"

The man smiled gratefully, then looked imploringly in her eyes, and said, "Dear Susan, go for me into the prison and pay Strutt and Robinson each a visit. Strutt the longest, he is the oldest. Poor things! they miss me sadly."

Susan made no foolish objection. She did what she was asked, and came back and told him all they had said and all she had said; and how kind everybody was to her in the prison; and how they had all asked how he was to-day.

"They are very good," said he feebly.

Soon after he dosed; and Susan, who always wore a cheerful look to his face, could now yield to her real feelings.

She sat at some little distance from the bed and tried to work, and every now and then looked up to watch him, and again and again her eyes were blinded; and she laid down her work, for her heart said to her, "A few short days and you will see him no more."

Mrs. Davies, too, was grave and sad. She had made the house neat and clean from cellar to garret, and now he who should have enjoyed it lay there sick unto death.

"Susan," said she, "I doubt I have been sent here to set his house in order against his--"

"Oh! don't tell me that," cried Susan, and she burst into a fit of sobbing, for Mrs. Davies had harped her own fear.

"Take care, he is waking, Susan. He must not see us."

"Oh, no!" and the next moment she was by her patient's side with a cheerful look and voice and manner well calculated to keep any male heart from sinking, sick or well.

Heavy heart and hopeful face! such a nurse was Susan Merton. This kind deception became more difficult every day. Her patient wasted and wasted; and the anxious look that is often seen on a death-stricken man's face showed itself. Mrs. Davies saw it and Susan saw it; but the sick man himself as yet had never spoken of his decease; and both Mrs.

Davies and Susan often wondered that he did not seem to see his real state.

But one day it so happened that he was light-headed and greatly excited, holding a conversation. His eye was flas.h.i.+ng, and he spoke in bursts, and then stopped a while and seemed to be listening in irritation to some arguments with which he did not agree. The enthusiast was building a prison in the air. A prison with a farm, a school, and a manufactory attached. Here were to be combined the good points of every system, and others of his own.

"Yes," said he, in answer to his imaginary companion, "there shall be both separation and silence for those whose moral case it suits--for all, perhaps, at first--but not for all always. Away with your Morrison's pill-system; your childish monotony of moral treatment in cases varying and sometimes opposed.

"Yes, but I would. I would allow a degree of intercourse between such as were disposed to confirm each other in good. Watch them? why, of course--and closely, too.

"Intelligent labor for every creature in the place. No tickets-of-leave to let the hypocritical or self-deceiving ones loose upon the world.