During the whole course of the terrible scene which was now at itsheight, one man in the jail suffered a degree of fear and mentaltorment which had no parallel in the endurance, even of those wholay under sentence of death.
When the rioters first assembled before the building, the murdererwas roused from sleep--if such slumbers as his may have thatblessed name--by the roar of voices, and the struggling of a greatcrowd. He started up as these sounds met his ear, and, sitting onhis bedstead, listened.
After a short interval of silence the noise burst out again. Stilllistening attentively, he made out, in course of time, that thejail was besieged by a furious multitude. His guilty conscienceinstantly arrayed these men against himself, and brought the fearupon him that he would be singled out, and torn to pieces.
Once impressed with the terror of this conceit, everything tendedto confirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the circumstancesunder which it had been committed, the length of time that hadelapsed, and its discovery in spite of all, made him, as it were,the visible object of the Almighty"s wrath. In all the crime andvice and moral gloom of the great pest-house of the capital, hestood alone, marked and singled out by his great guilt, a Luciferamong the devils. The other prisoners were a host, hiding andsheltering each other--a crowd like that without the walls. He wasone man against the whole united concourse; a single, solitary,lonely man, from whom the very captives in the jail fell off andshrunk appalled.
It might be that the intelligence of his capture having beenbruited abroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out andkill him in the street; or it might be that they were the rioters,and, in pursuance of an old design, had come to sack the prison.
But in either case he had no belief or hope that they would sparehim. Every shout they raised, and every sound they made, was ablow upon his heart. As the attack went on, he grew more wild andfrantic in his terror: tried to pull away the bars that guarded thechimney and prevented him from climbing up: called loudly on theturnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from the fury ofthe rabble; or put him in some dungeon underground, no matter ofwhat depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset with rats andcreeping things, so that it hid him and was hard to find.
But no one came, or answered him. Fearful, even while he cried tothem, of attracting attention, he was silent. By and bye, he saw,as he looked from his grated window, a strange glimmering on thestone walls and pavement of the yard. It was feeble at first, andcame and went, as though some officers with torches were passing toand fro upon the roof of the prison. Soon it reddened, and lightedbrands came whirling down, spattering the ground with fire, andburning sullenly in corners. One rolled beneath a wooden bench,and set it in a blaze; another caught a water-spout, and so wentclimbing up the wall, leaving a long straight track of fire behindit. After a time, a slow thick shower of burning fragments, fromsome upper portion of the prison which was blazing nigh, began tofall before his door. Remembering that it opened outwards, he knewthat every spark which fell upon the heap, and in the act lost itsbright life, and died an ugly speck of dust and rubbish, helped toentomb him in a living grave. Still, though the jail resoundedwith shrieks and cries for help,--though the fire bounded up as ifeach separate flame had had a tiger"s life, and roared as though,in every one, there were a hungry voice--though the heat began togrow intense, and the air suffocating, and the clamour withoutincreased, and the danger of his situation even from one mercilesselement was every moment more extreme,--still he was afraid toraise his voice again, lest the crowd should break in, and should,of their own ears or from the information given them by the otherprisoners, get the clue to his place of confinement. Thus fearfulalike, of those within the prison and of those without; of noiseand silence; light and darkness; of being released, and being leftthere to die; he was so tortured and tormented, that nothing manhas ever done to man in the horrible caprice of power and cruelty,exceeds his self-inflicted punishment.
Now, now, the door was down. Now they came rushing through thejail, calling to each other in the vaulted passages; clashing theiron gates dividing yard from yard; beating at the doors of cellsand wards; wrenching off bolts and locks and bars; tearing down thedoor-posts to get men out; endeavouring to drag them by main forcethrough gaps and windows where a child could scarcely pass;whooping and yelling without a moment"s rest; and running throughthe heat and flames as if they were cased in metal. By their legs,their arms, the hair upon their heads, they dragged the prisonersout. Some threw themselves upon the captives as they got towardsthe door, and tried to file away their irons; some danced aboutthem with a frenzied joy, and rent their clothes, and were ready,as it seemed, to tear them limb from limb. Now a party of a dozenmen came darting through the yard into which the murderer castfearful glances from his darkened window; dragging a prisoner alongthe ground whose dress they had nearly torn from his body in theirmad eagerness to set him free, and who was bleeding and senselessin their hands. Now a score of prisoners ran to and fro, who hadlost themselves in the intricacies of the prison, and were sobewildered with the noise and glare that they knew not where toturn or what to do, and still cried out for help, as loudly asbefore. Anon some famished wretch whose theft had been a loaf ofbread, or scrap of butcher"s meat, came skulking past, barefooted-goingslowly away because that jail, his house, was burning; notbecause he had any other, or had friends to meet, or old haunts torevisit, or any liberty to gain, but liberty to starve and die.