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Although he had not once been visited between meals, he thought it prudent not to begin the work of making his rope until the sun was getting low. When it did so he tore up the blankets, twisted and knotted together the strips, and then sat down to await the coming of the jailers.
He had learned, too, from Fraulein Eva that the Redeemer Himself promised the crown of eternal life to those who remain faithful unto death. In this confidence he awaited the jailers, who perhaps would come very soon to lead him into the most joyless of all apartments the Nuremberg torture chamber. Then he told the ladies what he knew of the love which united Heinz and Eva.
In fact, the more weak and wretched I felt, at night, the greater were my efforts during the day to appear cheerful in conversing with my companions, with the two boys at the palace, and with my jailers. No one to hear my jokes, would have imagined it possible that I was suffering under the disease I did.
Luckily, I made my escape from the monster! rejoined my friend, General Darke-Davenant; the war came on; I came back here; have been lately arrested, but escaped by bribing the rebel jailers; only, however, to find that my naughty husband is going to marry my cousin Georgia! Can you wonder, then, that I have exerted myself to be present at the interesting ceremony?
There the jailers roughly ordered him to hold his peace, and dragged him off to be pinioned to his fellow-sufferer. Stephen was not called till some minutes later, and had not seen him since.
I cried, "who art thou? tell me thy name! I am Silvio Pellico." "Oh, Silvio!" cried my neighbour, "I know you not by person, but I have long loved you. Get up to your window, and let us speak to each other, in spite of the jailers." I crawled up as well as I could; he told me his name, and we exchanged few words of kindness.
The entente cordiale extended even in some instances to the jailers and the bench, and, as in those early days of the Quaker persecution of which Milton's friend, Ellwood, has left record, prisoners sometimes left their cells for a night to attend to imperative affairs, or good-naturedly shortened or canceled their sentences at the pressing solicitation of perturbed magistrates.
In the most degrading manner, like a flock of sheep, they were shut up in spaces hardly able to contain them; damp straw was their bed, bread and water their only nourishment, and this was brought to them with words of cruel insult by their Prussian jailers. But to these latter the burden soon became too heavy; they were weary of their cruel service, and sought to lighten it.
They were cast into the darkest and most unendurable place in their prison; their feet were dragged out and compressed to the utmost tension of the muscles; the jailers, as if instigated by a demon, tried every sort of torture, insomuch that several of them, for whom God willed such an end, died of suffocation in prison.
I leaned against the window, listened to the passing and repassing of the jailers, and the wild song of a number of the unhappy inmates.
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