'Brought here by force — brought here to pick the lock of the
great door for them,' rejoined the locksmith. 'Bear witness for
406 BARNABY RUDGE
me, Mr. Akerman, that I refuse to do it; and that I will not do it,
come what may of my refusal. If any violence is done to me,
please to remember this.'
'Is there no way of helping you?' said the governor.
'None, Mr. Akerman. You '11 do your duty, and I '11 do mine.
Once again, you robbers and cut-throats,' said the locksmith, turn-
ing round upon them, 'I refuse. Ah! Howl till you 're hoarse. I
refuse.'
'Stay — stay!' said the jailer, hastily. 'Mr. Varden, I know you
for a worthy man, and one who would do no unlawful act except
upon compulsion — '
'Upon compulsion, sir,' interposed the locksmith, who felt that
the tone in which this was said, conveyed the speaker's impres-
sion that he had ample excuse for yielding to the furious multi-
tude who beset and hemmed him in, on every side, and among
whom he stood, an old man, quite alone; 'upon compulsion, sir,
I '11 do nothing.'
'Where is that man,' said the keeper, anxiously, 'who spoke to
Dae just now?'
'Here!' Hugh replied.
'Do you know what the guilt of murder is, and that by keeping
th3,t honest tradesman at your side you endanger his life!'
'We know it very well,' he answered, 'for what else did we
bring him here? Let 's have our friends, master, and you shall
have your friend. Is that fair, lads?'
The mob replied to him with a loud Hurrah!
'You see how it is, sir?' cried Varden. 'Keep 'em out, in King
George's name. Remember what I have said. Good-night!'
There was no more parley. A shower of stones and other mis-
siles compelled the keeper of the jail to retire; and the mob,
pressing on, and swarming round the walls, forced Gabriel Varden
close up to the door.
In vain the basket of tools was laid upon the ground before
him, and he was urged in turn by promises, by blows, by offers of
reward, and threats of instant death, to do the office for which
they had brought him here. 'No,' cried the sturdy locksmith, 'I
will not!'
He had never loved his life so well as then, but nothing could
BARNABY RUDGE 49T
move him. The savage faces that glared upon him, look where
he would; the cries of those who thirsted, like wild animals, for
his blood; the sight of men pressing forward, and trampling down
their fellows, as they strove to reach him, and struck at him above
the heads of other men, with axes and with iron bars ; all failed to
daunt him. He looked from man to man, and face to face, and
still, with quickened breath and lessening colour, cried tirmly, 'I
will not!'
Dennis dealt him a blow upon the face which felled him to the
ground. He sprung up again like a man in the prime of life, and
with blood upon his forehead, caught him by the throat.
'You cowardly dog!' he said: 'Give me my daughter. Give me
my daughter.'
They struggled together. Some cried 'Kill him,' and some (but
they were not near enough) strove to trample him to death. Tug
as he would at the old man's wrists, the hangman could not force
him to unclench his hands.
'Is this all the return you make me, you ungrateful monster.^*
he articulated with great difficulty, and with many oaths.
'Give me my daughter!' cried the locksmith, who was now as
fierce as those who gathered round him: 'Give me my daughter!'
He was down again, and up, and down once more, and buffeting
with a score of them, who bandied him from hand to hand, wheri
one tall fellow, fresh from a slaughter-house, whose dress and
great thigh-boots smoked hot with grease and blood, raised a
pole-axe, and swearing a horrible oath, aimed it at the old man's
uncovered head. At that instant, and in the very act, he fell him-
self, as if struck by lightning, and over his body, a one-armed man
came darting to the locksmith's side. Another man was with him,
and both caught the locksmith roughly in their grasp.
'Leave him to us!' they cried to Hugh — struggling, as they
spoke, to force a passage backward through the crowd. 'Leave
him to us. Why do you waste your whole strength on such as he,
when a couple of men can finish him in as many minutes. You
lose time. Remember the prisoners! remember Barnaby!'
The cry ran through the mob. Hammers began to rattle on the
walls; and every man strove to reach the prison, and be among
the foremost rank. Fighting their way through the press and
4<98 BARNABY RUDGE
struggle, as desperately as if they were in the midst of enemies
rather than their own friends, the two men retreated with the
locksmith between them, and dragged him through the very heart
of the concourse.
And now the strokes began to fall like hail upon the gate, and
on the strong building; for those who could not reach the door,
spent their fierce rage on anything — even on the great blocks of
stone, which shivered their weapons into fragments, and made
their hands and arms to tingle as if the walls were active in their
stout resistance, and dealt them back their blows. The clash of
iron ringing upon iron, mingled with the deafening tumult and
sounded high above it, as the great sledge-hammers rattled on the
nailed and plated door : the sparks flew off in showers ; men worked
in gangs, and at short intervals relieved each other, that all their
strength might be devoted to the work ; but there stood the portal
still, as grim and dark and strong as ever, and, saving for the
dints upon its battered surface, quite unchanged.
While some brought all their energies to bear upon this toil-
some task; and some, rearing ladders against the prison, tried to
clamber to the summit of the walls they were too short to scale;
and some again engaged a body of police a hundred strong, and
beat them back and trod them under foot by force of numbers;
others besieged the house on which the jailer had appeared, and
driving in the door, brought out his furniture, and piled it up
against the prison-gate, to make a bonfire which should burn it
down. As soon as this device was understood, all those who had
laboured hitherto, cast down their tools and helped to swell the
heap; which reached half-way across the street, and was so high,
that those who threw more fuel on the top, got up by ladders.
When all the keeper s goods were flung upon this costly pile, to
the last fragment, they smeared it with the pitch, and tar, and
rosin they had brought, and sprinkled it with turpentine. To all
the woodwork round the prison-doors they did the like, leaving not
a joist or beam untouched. This infernal christening performed,
they fired the pile with lighted matches and with blazing tow,
and then stood by, awaiting the result.
The furniture being very dry, and rendered more combustible
by wax and oil, besides the arts they had used, took fire at once.
BARNABY RUDGE 499
The flames roared high and fiercely, blackening the prison-wall,
and twining up its lofty front like burning serpents. At first they
crowded round the blaze, and vented their exultation only in
their looks: but w^hen it grew hotter and fiercer — when it crackled,
leaped, and roared, like a great furnace — when it shone upon the
opposite houses, and lighted up not only the pale and wondering
faces at the windows, but the inmost corners of each habitation — •
when through the deep red heat and glow, the fire was seen sport-
ing and toying with the door, now clinging to its obdurate surface,
now gliding off with fierce inconstancy and soaring high into the
sky, anon returning to fold it in its burning grasp and lure it to its
ruin — when it shone and gleamed so brightly that the church
clock at St. Sepulchre's so often pointing to the hour of death,
was legible as in broad day, and the vane upon its steeple-top
glittered in the unwonted light like something richly jewelled —
when blackened stone and sombre brick grew ruddy in the deep
reflection, and windows shone like burnished gold, dotting the
longest distance in the fiery vista with their specks of brightness —
when wall and tower, and roof and chimney-stack, seemed drunk^
and in the flickering glare appeared to reel and stagger — when
scores of objects, never seen before, burst out upon the view, and
things the most familiar put on some new aspect — then the mob
began to join the whirl, and with loud yells, and shouts, and
clamour, such as happily is seldom heard, bestirred themselves to
feed the fire, and keep it at its height.
x\lthough the heat was so intense that the paint on the houses
over against the prison, parched and crackled up, and swelling into
boils, as it were from excess of torture, broke and crumbled away;
although the glass fell from the window-sashes, and the lead and
iron on the roofs blistered the incautious hand that touched them,
and the sparrows in the eaves took wing, and rendered giddy by
the smoke, fell fluttering down upon the blazing pile; still the
fire was tended unceasingly by busy hands, and round it, men
were going always. They never slackened in their zeal, or kept
aloof, but pressed upon the flames so hard, that those in front
had much ado to save themselves from being thrust in; if one man
swooned or dropped, a dozen struggled for his place, and that al-
though they knew the pain, and thirst, and pressure to be unen-
500 BARNABY RUDGE
durable. Those who fell down in famting-fits, and were not
crushed or burnt, were carried to an inn-yard close at hand, and
dashed with water from a pump; of which buckets full were
passed from man to man among the crowd; but such was the
strong desire of all to drink, and such the fighting to be first,
that, for the most part, the whole contents were spilled upon the
ground, without the lips of one man being moistened.
^leanwhile, and in the midst of all the roar and outcry, those
who were nearest to the pile, heaped up again the burning frag-
ments that came toppling down, and raked the fire about the door,
v/hich, although a sheet of flam.e, was still a door fast locked and
barred, and kept them out. Great pieces of blazing wood were
passed, besides, above the people's heads to such as stood about
the ladders, and some of these, climbing up to the topmost stave,
and holding on with one hand by the prison wall, exerted all their
skill and force to cast these fire-brands on the roof, or down into
the yards within. In many instances their efforts were successful;
which occasioned a new and appalling addition to the horrors of
the scene: for the prisoners within, seeing from between their
bars that the fire caught in many places and thrived fiercely, and
being all locked up in strong cells for the night, began to know
that they were in danger of being burnt alive. This terrible fear,
spreading from cell to cell and from yard to yard, vented itself in
such dismal cries and wailings, and in such dreadful shrieks for
help, that the whole jail resounded with the noise; which was
loudly heard even above the shouting of the mob and roaring of
the flames, and was so full of agony and despair, that it made the
boldest tremble.
It was remarkable that these cries began in that quarter of the
jail which fronted Newgate Street, where it was well known, the
men who were to suffer death on Thursday were confined. And
not only were these four who had so short a time to live, the first
to whom the dread of being burnt occurred, but they were,
throughout, the most importunate of all: for they could be plainly
heard, notwithstanding the great thickness of the walls, crying
that the wind set that way, and that the flames would shortly
reach them; and calling to the officers of the jail to come and
quench the fire from a cistern which was in their yard, and full
BARNABY RUDGE 501
of water. Judging from what the crowd outside the walls could
hear from time to time, these four doomed wretches never ceased
to call for help; and that with as much distraction, and in as great
a frenzy of attachment to existence, as though each had an hon-
oured, happy life before him, instead of eight-and-forty hours of
miserable imprisonment, and then a violent and shameful death.
But the anguish and suffering of the two sons of one of these
men, when they heard, or fancied that they heard, their father's
voice, is past description. After wringing their hands and rush-
ing to and fro as if they were stark mad, one mounted on the
shoulders of his brother, and tried to clamber up the face of the
high wall, guarded at the top with spikes and points of iron. And
when he fell among the crowd, he was not deterred by his bruises,
but mounted up again, and fell again, and, when he found the feat
impossible, began to beat the stones and tear them with his hands,
as if he could that way make a breach in the strong building, and
force a passage in. At last, they cleft their way among the mob
about the door, though many men, a dozen times their match,
had tried in vain to do so, and were seen, in — yes, in — the fire,
striving to prize it down, with crowbars.
Nor were they alone affected by the outcry from within the
prison. The women who were looking on, shrieked loudly, beat
their hands together, stopped their ears; and many fainted: the
men who were not near the walls and active in the siege, rather
than do nothing, tore up the pavement of the street, and did so
with a haste and fury they could not have surpassed if that had
been the jail, and they were near their object. Not one living
creature in the throng was for an instant still. The whole great
mass were mad.
A shout! Another! Another yet, though few knew why, or
what it meant. But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield,
and drop from its top-most hinge. It hung on that side by but
one, but it v/as upright still, because of the bar, and its having
sunk, of its own weight, into the heap of ashes at its foot. There
was now a gap at the top of the doorway, through which could be
descried a gloomy passage, cavernous and dark. Pile up the fire!
It burnt fiercely. The door was red-hot, and the gap wider.
They vainly tried to shield their races with their hands, and
502 BARNABY RUDGE
standing as if in readiness for a spring, watched the place. Dark
figures, some crawhng on their hands and knees, some carried in
the arms of others, were seen to pass along the roof. It was plain
the jail could hold out no longer. The keeper, and his officers,
and their wives and children, were escaping. Pile up the fire!
The door sank down again: it settled deeper in the cinders —
tottered — ^yielded — was down !
As they shouted again, they fell back, for a moment, and left
a clear space about the fire that lay between them and the jail
entry. Hugh leapt upon the blazing heap, and scattering a train
of sparks into the air, and making the dark lobby glitter with those
that hung upon his dress, dashed into the jail.
The hangman followed. And then so many rushed upon their
track, that the fire got trodden down and thinly strewn about the
street; but there was no need of it now, for, inside and out, the
prison was in flames.
CHAPTER LXV
During the whole course of the terrible scene which was now at
its height, one man in the jail suffered a degree of fear and men-
tal torment which had no parallel in the endurance, even of those
who lay under sentence of death.
When the rioters first assembled before the building, the mur-
derer was roused from sleep^ — if such slumbers as his may have
that blessed name — by the roar of voices, and the struggling of a
great crowd. He started up as these sounds met his ear, and,
sitting on his bedstead, listened.
After a short interval of silence the noise burst out again. Still
listening attentively, he made out, in course of time, that the jail
was besieged by a furious multitude. His guilty conscience in-
stantly arrayed these men against himself, and brought the fear
upon him that he would be singled out, and torn to pieces.
Once impressed with the terror of this conceit, everything
tended to confirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the cir-
BARNABY RUDGE 503
cumstances under which it had been committed, the length of
time that had elapsed, and its discovery in spite of all, made him,
as it were, the visible object of the Almighty's wrath. In all the
crime and vice and moral gloom of the great pesthouse of the
capital, he stood alone, marked and singled out by his great guilty
a Lucifer among the devils. The other prisoners were a host,
hiding and sheltering each other — a crowd like that without the
walls. He was one man against the whole united concourse; a
single, solitary, lonely man, from whom the very captives in the
jail fell off and shrunk appalled.
It might be that the intelligence of his capture having been
bruited abroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out
and kill 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 spare
him. Every shout they raised, and every sound they made, was
a blow upon his heart. As the attack went on, he grew more wild
and frantic in his terror: tried to pull away the bars that guardecJ
the chimney and prevented him from climbing up: called loudly
on the turnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from the
fury of the rabble; or put him in some dungeon underground, no
matter of what depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset
with rats and creeping things, so that it hid him and was hard to
find.
But no one came, or answered him. Fearful, even while he cried
to them, of attracting attention, he was silent. By and by, he saw,,
as he looked from his grated window, a strange glimmering on
the stone walls and pavement of the yard. It was feeble at first,,
and came and went, as though some officers with torches were pass-
ing to and fro upon the roof of the prison. Soon it reddened, and
lighted brands came whirling down, spattering the ground with
fire, and burning sullenly in corners. One rolled beneath a wooden
bench, and set it in a blaze: another caught a water-spout, and so
went climbing up the wall, leaving a long straight track of fire
behind it. After a time, a slow thick shower of burning fragments,
from some upper portion of the prison which was blazing nigh,,
began to fall before his door. Remembering that it opened out-
wards, he knew that evsy spaik which fell upon the heap, and
504 BARNABY RUDGE
in the act lost its bright Hfe, and died an ugly speck of dust and
rubbish, heiped to entomb him in a living grave. Still, though the
jail resounded with shrieks and cries for help, — though the fire
bounded up as if each separate flame had had a tiger's life, and
roared as though, in every one, there were a hungry voice —
though the heat began to grow intense, and the air suffocating, and
the clamour without increased, and the danger of his situation even
from one merciless element was every moment more extreme, —
still he was afraid to raise his voice again, lest the crowd should
break in, and should, of their own ears or from the information
given them by the other prisoners, get the clue to his place of
confinement. Thus fearful alike, of those within the prison and of
those without; of noise and silence; light and darkness; of being
released, and being left there to die; he was so tortured and tor-
mented, that nothing man has even 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
the jail, calling to each other in the vaulted passages; clashing the
iron gates dividing yard from yard; beating at the doors of cells
and wards; wrenching off bolts and locks and bars; tearing down
the door-posts to get men out ; endeavouring to drag them by main
force through gaps and windows where a child could scarcely pass;
whooping and yelling without a moment's rest; and running
through the heat and flames as if they were cased in metal. By
their legs, their arms, the hair upon their heads, they dragged
the prisoners out. Some threw themselves upon their captives as
they got towards the door, and tried to file away their irons; some
danced about them with frenzied joy, and rent their clothes, and
were ready, as it seemed, to tear them limb from limb. Now a
party of a dozen men came darting through the yard into which
the murderer cast fearful glances from his darkened window; drag-
ging a prisoner along the ground whose dress they had nearly torn
from his body in their mad eagerness to set him free, and who was
bleeding and senseless in their hands. Now a score of prisoners
ran to and fro, who had lost themselves in the intricacies of the
prison, and were so bewildered with the noise and glare that they
knew not where to turn or what to do, and still cried out for help,
as loudly as before. Anon some famished wretch whose theft had
BARXABY RUDGE 505
been a loaf of bread, or scrap of butcher's meat, came skulking
■past, barefooted — going slowly away because that jail, his house,
was burning: not because he had any other, or had friends to
meet, or old haunts to revisit, or any liberty to gain, but liberty
to starve and die. And then a knot of highwa\Tnen went trooping
by, conducted by the friends they had among the crowd, who
muffled their fetters as they went along, with handkerchiefs and
bands of hay, and wrapped them in coats and cloaks, and gave them
drink from bottles, and held it to their lips, because of their hand-
cuffs which there was no time to remove. All this, and Heaven
knows how much more, was done amidst a noise, a hurry, and dis-
traction, like nothing that we know of, even in our dreams ; which
seemed for ever on the rise, and never to decrease for the space of
a single instant.
He was still looking do"^!! from his window upon these things,
when a band of men with torches, ladders, axes, and many kinds of
weapons, poured into the yard, and hammering at his door, in-
quired if there were any prisoner within. He left the window
when he saw them coming, and drew back into the remotest cor-
ner of the cell: but although he returned them no answer, they had
a fancy that some one was inside, for they presently set ladders
against it, and began to tear away the bars at the casement: not
only that, indeed, but with pickaxes to hew down the very stones
in the wall.
As soon as they had made a breach at the window, large enough
for the admission of a man's head, one of them thrust in a torch
and looked all round the room. He followed this man's gaze until
it rested on himself, and heard him demand why he had not an-
swered, but made him no reply.
In the general surprise and wonder, they were used to this : with-
out saving anything more, they enlarged the breach until it was
large enough to admit the body of a man, and then came dropping
down upon the floor, one after another, until the cell was full.
They caught him up among them, handed him to the window, and
those who stood upon the ladders passed him down upon the pave-
ment of the yard. Then the rest came out, one after another, and.
bidding him fly, and lose no time, or the way would be choked
up, hurried away to rescue others.
506 BARNABY RUDGE
It seemed not a minute's work from first to last. He staggered
to his feet, incredulous of what had happened, when the yard was
filled again, and a crowd rushed on, hurrying Barnaby among
them. In another minute — not so much: another minute I the
same instant, with no lapse or interval between! — he and his son
were being passed from hand to hand, through the dense crowd in
the street, and were glancing backwards at a burning pile which
some one said was Newgate.
From the moment of their first entrance into the prison, the
crowd dispersed themselves about it, and swarmed into every
chink and crevice, as if they had a perfect acquaintance with its
innermost parts, and bore in their minds an exact plan of the
whole. For this immediate knowledge of the place, they were, no
doubt, in a great degree, indebted to the hangman, who stood in
the lobby, directing some to go this way, some that, and some the
other ; and who materially assisted in bringing about the wonderful
rapidity with which the release of the prisoners was effected.
But this functionary of the law reserved one important piece of
intelligence, and kept it snugly to himself. When he had issued
his instructions relative to every other part of the building, and
the mob were dispersed from end to end, and busy at their work,
he took a bundle of keys from a kind of cupboard in the wall, and