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"I'm not so sure that Jan was mad!" he retorted. "I told him that I hadn't seen any gaolers around Glory Goldie. 'My good Linnart, he then said, 'didn't you notice how closely they guarded her when she drove by? They were Pride and Hardness, Lust and Vice, all the enemies she has to battle against back there in her Empire." Glory Goldie stopped a moment and turned toward Linnart.
It was customary on board these floating prisons to keep each man's crime a secret from his fellows, so that if he chose, and the caprice of his gaolers allowed him, he could lead a new life in his adopted home, without being taunted with his former misdeeds.
For five months Captain Wright had seen only gaolers, spies, tyrants, executioners, fetters, racks, and other tortures; and for five weeks his food had been bread and his drink water. The man who, thus situated and thus perplexed, preserves his native dignity and innate sentiments, is more worthy of monuments, statues, or altars than either the legislator, the victor, or the saint.
Ask his name of his gaolers, and they will say it is "Sir Henry of Lancaster, the usurper;" but ask it of himself, and a momentary flash lights up the sunken eyes as he answers, "I am the King." Neither Pharisee nor Sadducee is Henry the Sixth. He is not a Lollard, simply because he never knew what Lollardism was.
The prisons were crowded with them, but persecution seldom has any other effect than to increase the number of proselytes. These came, therefore, from their confinement more strongly confirmed in the principles they had imbibed, and followed by their gaolers, whom they had brought over to their belief.
Others seized upon the messengers who brought the food, and tore it from their hands, though the whips of the gaolers laid their backs open. There were thirty gaolers to guard that enclosure, each armed with his rhinoceros-hide courbatch, but this was the one moment in each day when the courbatch was neither feared, nor, as it seemed, felt.
Here too, in a corner of the Yard, they show the Cell in which if the person who was confined in it did not incessantly Pump out the Water let into it, he must inevitably be Drowned; but this Engine, the Gaolers said, had not been used for many Years, and was only kept up as an object of Terror.
Half borne, half dragged betwixt his gaolers, he came on stumbling feet a woeful shivering thing with languid head a-droop; a thing of noisome rags that told of nights and days in dungeon black and foul; a thing whose shrunken nakedness showed a multitude of small wounds, slow-bleeding, that spoke of teeth little yet vicious, bold with hunger in the dark; a miserable, tottering thing, haggard and pinched, that shivered and shook and stared upon all things with eyes vacant and wide.
On the day of that letter's delivery, the 10th of March also famous as the day on which Buonaparte's escape from Elba was published in England Lord Cochrane's gaolers discovered that he was no longer in his prison. Immediately a hue and cry was raised. This notice was issued: "Escaped from the King's Bench Prison, on Monday the 6th day of March, instant, Lord Cochrane.
The stench was appalling, and gaol fever killed more than died on the gallows. Debtors and felons, men, women and children, were huddled together; often with lunatics, who were shown by the gaolers for money. 'Garnish' was extorted; the gaolers kept drinking-taps; gambling flourished: and prisoners were often cruelly ironed, and kept for long periods before trial.
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