It Is Never Too Late to Mend Part 94

"He sends his best wishes for your recovery."

"Now that is very good of him."

"And he would be very glad to hear from yourself how you feel."

"Well, sir, you tell him I am a trifle better, and G.o.d bless him for troubling his head about me."

In short, his reverence reversed the Hawes system. Under that a prisoner was divested of humanity and became a number and when he fell sick the sentiment created was, "The figure written on the floor of that cell looks faint." When he died or was murdered, "There is such and such a figure rubbed off our slate."

Mr. Eden made these figures signify flesh and blood, even to those who never saw their human faces. When he had softened a prisoner's heart then he laid the deeper truths of Christianity to that heart. They would not adhere to ice or stone or bra.s.s. He knew that till he had taught a man to love his brother whom he had seen he could never make him love G.o.d whom he has not seen. To vary the metaphor, his plan was, first warm and soften your wax then begin to shape it after Heaven's pattern.

The old-fas.h.i.+oned way is freeze, petrify and mold your wax by a single process. Not that he was mawkish. No man rebuked sin more terribly than he often rebuked it in many of these cells; and when he did so see what he gained by the personal kindness that preceded these terrible rebukes!

The rogue said: "What! is it so bad that his reverence, who I know has a regard for me, rebukes me for it like this?--why, it must be bad indeed!"

A loving friend's rebuke is a rebuke--sinks into the heart and convinces the judgment; an enemy's or stranger's rebuke is invective and irritates--not converts. The great vice of the new prisons is general self-deception varied by downright calculating hypocrisy. A shallow zealot like Mr. Lepel is sure to drive the prisoners into one or other of these. It was Mr. Eden's struggle to keep them out of it. He froze cant in the bud. Puritanical burglars tried Scriptural phrases on him as a matter of course, but they soon found it was the very worse lay they could get upon in ---- Jail. The notion that a man can jump from the depths of vice up to the climax of righteous habits, spiritual-mindedness, at one leap, shocked his sense and terrified him for the daring dogs that profess these saltatory powers and the geese that believe it. He said to such: "Let me see you crawl heavenward first, then walk heavenward; it will be time enough to soar when you have lived soberly, honestly, piously a year or two--not here, where you are tied hands, feet and tongue, but free among the world's temptations." He had no blind confidence in learned-by-heart texts.

"Many a scoundrel has a good memory," said he.

Here he was quite opposed to his friend Lepel. This gentleman attributed a sort of physical virtue to Holy Writ poured anyhow into a human vessel. His plan of making a thief honest will appear incredible to a more enlightened age; yet it is widely accepted now and its advocates call Mr. Eden a dreamer. It was this: He came into a cell cold and stern and set the rogues a lot of texts. Those that learned a great many he called good prisoners, and those that learned few--black sheep; and the prisoners soon found out that their life, bitter as it was, would be bitterer if they did not look sharp and learn a good many texts. So they learned lots--and the slyest scoundrels learned the most. "Why not?"

said they, "in these cursed holes we have nothing better to do; and it is the only way to get the parson's good word, and that is always worth having in jail."

One rogue on getting out explained his knowledge of five hundred texts thus: "What did it hurt me learning texts? I'd just as lieve be learning texts as turning a crank, and as soon be d--d as either."

This fellow had been one of Mr. Lepel's sucking saints--a show prisoner.

The Bible and brute force--how odd they sound together! Yet such was the Lepel system, humbug apart. Put a thief in a press between an Old Testament and a New Testament. Turn the screw, crush the texts in, and the rogue's vices out! Conversion made easy! What a wonder he opposes cunning cloaked with religion to brutality cloaked under religion.

Ay, brutality, and laziness, and selfishness, all these are the true foundation of that system. Selfishness--for such a man won't do anything he does not like. No! "Why should I make myself 'all things to all men'

to save a soul? I will save them this one way or none--this is my way and they shall all come to it," says the reverend Procrustes, forgetting that if the heart is not won in vain is the will crushed; or perhaps not caring so that he gets his own way.

To work on Mr. Eden's plan is a herculean effort day by day repeated; but to set texts is easy, easier even than to learn them--and how easy that is appears from the mult.i.tude of incurable felons who have swapped texts for tickets-of-leave. Messieurs Lepel, who teach solitary depressed sinners the Bible with screw and lifted lash and no love nor pity, a word in your ear. Begin a step higher. Go first to some charitable priest and at his feet learn that Bible yourselves!

Forgive my heat, dear reader. I am not an Eden, and these fellows rile me when I think of the good they might do, and they do nothing but force hypocrisy upon men who were bad enough without that. I allow a certain lat.i.tude; don't want to swim in hot water by quarreling with every madman or every dunce, but I do doubt any man's right to combine contradictory vices. Now these worthies are stupid yet wild, thick-headed yet delirious--tortoises and March hares.

My sketch of Mr. Eden and his ways is feeble and unworthy. But I conclude it with one master-stroke of eulogy--He was the opposite of these men.

CHAPTER XLIII.

WE left Thomas Robinson writing his life. He has written it. It has been printed by prisoners and circulated among prisoners. One copy lay in Robinson's cell till he left the prison, and to this copy were appended Mr. Eden's remarks in MS.

This autobiography is a self-drawn portrait of a true Bohemian and his mind from boyhood up to the date when he fell into my hands.

Unfortunately we cannot afford so late in our story to make any retrograde step. The "Autobiography of a Thief" must therefore be thrust into my Appendix or printed elsewhere.

The reader has seen Robinson turned into a fiend by cruelty and turned back to a man by humanity.

On this followed many sacred, softening, improving lessons, and as he loved Mr. Eden his heart was open to them.

Most prisoners are very sensible of genuine kindness, and docile as wax in the hands of those who show it. They are the easiest cla.s.s in the world to impress. The difficulty is to make the impression permanent.

But the people who pretend to you that kindness does not greatly affect, persuade and help convince them HAVE NEVER TRIED ANYTHING BUT BRUTALITY, and never will; for nothing greater, wiser or better is in them.

I will now indicate the other phases through which his mind pa.s.sed in ---- Jail.

Being shown that his crimes were virtually the cause of Mary's hapless life and untimely death, and hard pressed by his father confessor, he fell into religious despondency; believed his case desperate, and his sins too many for Heaven's mercy.

Of all states of mind this was the one Mr. Eden most dreaded. He had observed that the notion that they cannot be reconciled to G.o.d and man is the cause of prisoners' recklessness, and one great means by which jail officers and society, England A.D. 185--, confirm them in ill.

He soothed and cheered the poor fellow with many a hopeful message from the gospel of mercy and soon drew him out of the Slough of Despond; but he drew him out with so eager an arm that up went this impressionable personage from despond to the fifth heaven. He was penitent, forgiven, justified, sanctified, all in three weeks. Moreover, he now fell into a certain foul habit. Of course Scripture formed a portion of his daily reading and discourse with the chaplain. Robinson had a memory that seized and kept everything like a vise, so now a text occurred to him for every occasion, and he interwove them with all his talk. Your shallow observers would have said, "What a hypocrite!"

Not a hypocrite, oh Criticaster, but a chameleon! who had been months out of the atmosphere of vice and in an atmosphere of religion.

His reverence broke him of this nasty habit of chattering Bible, and generally cooled him down. Finally he became sober, penitent for his past life, and firmly resolved to lead a better. With this began to mingle ambition to rise very high in the world, and a violent impatience to begin.

Through all these phases ran one excellent and saving thing, a genuine attachment to his good friend the chaplain. The attachment was reciprocal, and there was something touching in the friends.h.i.+p of two men so different in mind and worldly station. But they had suffered together. And indeed a much more depraved prisoner than Robinson would have loved such a benefactor and brother as Eden; and many a scoundrel in this place did love him as well as he could love anything; and as to the other, the clew to him is simple. While the vulgar self-deceiving moralist loathes the detected criminal, and never (whatever he may think) really rises to abhorrence of crime, the saint makes two steps upward toward the mind of Heaven itself, abhors crime, and loves, pities, and will not despair of the criminal.

But besides this Robinson was an engaging fellow, full of thought and full of facts, and the Rev. Francis Tender-Conscience often spent an extra five minutes in his cell and then reproached himself for letting the more interesting personage rob other depressed and thirsty souls of those drops of dew.

One day Mr. Eden, who had just entered the cell, said to Robinson, "Give me your hand. It is as I feared, your nerves are going."

"Are they?" said Robinson ruefully.

"Do you not observe that you are becoming tremulous?"

"I notice that when my door is opened suddenly it makes me shake a little and twitches come in my thigh."

"I feared as much. It is not every man that can bear separate confinement for twelve months. You cannot."

"I shall have to, whether I can or not."

"Will you?"

Three days after this Mr. Eden came into his cell and said with a sad smile, "I have good news for you; you are going to leave me.

"Oh, your reverence! is that good news?"

"Those who have the disposal of you are beginning to see that all punishment (except hanging) is for the welfare of the culprit, and must never be allowed to injure him. Strutt left the prison for my house a fortnight ago, and you are to cross the water next week."

"Oh, your reverence! Heaven forgive me for feeling glad."

"For being human, eh, my poor fellow?"

In the course of this conversation Mr. Eden frankly regretted that Robinson was going so soon. "Four months more prison would have made you safer, and I would have kept you here till the last minute of your sentence for the good of your soul," said he grimly; "but your body and nerves might have suffered," added he tenderly; "we must do all for the best."

A light burst on Robinson. "Why, your reverence," cried he, "is it for fear? Why you don't ever think that I shall turn rogue again after I get out of prison?"

"You are going among a thousand temptations."

"What! do you really think all your kindness has been wasted on me? Why, sir, if a thousand pounds lay there I would not stretch out my hand to take one that did not belong to me. How ungrateful you must think me, and what a fool into the bargain after all my experience!"

"Ungrateful you are not, but you are naturally a fool--a weak, flexible fool. A man with a tenth of your gifts would lead you by the nose into temptation. But I warn you if you fall now conscience will p.r.i.c.k you as it never yet has; you will be miserable, and yet though miserable perhaps will never rise again, for remorse is not penitence."