Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
He found the gas lighted. He was glad, for he was drenched through and
bitterly cold. He crept up to the little gaslight and put his dead white
hands over it and got a little warmth into them; he blessed this spark
of light and warmth; he looked lovingly down on it, it was his only
friend in the jail, his companion in the desolate cell. He wished he
could gather it into his bosom; then it would warm his heart and his
blighted flesh and aching, shivering bones.
While he hung shivering over his spark of light and warmth and comfort,
a key was put into his door. “Ah! here's supper,” thought he, “and I
am so hungry.” It was not supper, it was Fry who came in empty-handed,
leaving the door open. Fry went to his gaslight and put his finger and
thumb on the screw.
“Oh! it burns all right, Mr. Fry,” said Josephs, “it won't go any
higher, thank you.”
“No, it won't,” said Fry dryly, and turned it out, leaving the cell in
utter darkness.
“There, I told you so,” said Josephs pettishly, “now you have been and
turned it out.”
“Yes, I have been and turned it out,” replied Fry with a brutal laugh,
“and it won't be turned on again for fourteen days, so the governor
says, however, and I suppose he knows,” and Fry went out chuckling.
Josephs burst out sobbing and almost screaming at this last stroke; it
seemed to hurt him more than his fiercer tortures. He sobbed so wildly
and so loud that Mr. Jones, passing on the opposite corridor, heard him
and beckoned to Evans to open the cell.
They found the boy standing in the middle of his dungeon shaking with
cold in his drenched clothes and sobbing with his whole body. It was
frightful to see and hear the agony and despair of one so young in
years, so old in misery.
Mr. Jones gave him words of commonplace consolation. Mr. Jones tried to
persuade him that patience was the best cure.
“Be patient, and do not irritate the governor any more--the storm will
pass.”
He seemed to Josephs as one that mocketh. Jones's were such little
words to fling in the face of a great despair; to chatter unreasonable
consolation was to mock his unutterable misery of soul and body.
Mr. Jones was one of those who sprinkle a burning mountain with a
teaspoonful of milk and water, and then go away and make sure they have
put it out. When he was gone with this impression, Evans took down the
boy's bed and said:
“Don't ye cry now like that; it makes me ill to hear any Christian cry
like that.”
“Oh, Mr. Evans! oh! oh! oh! oh! What have I done? Oh, my mother! my
mother! my mother!”
Evans winced. What! had he a mother, too? If she could see him now!
and perhaps he was her darling though he was a prisoner. He shook the
bed-clothes out and took hold of the shivering boy and with kind force
made him lie down; then he twisted the clothes tight round him.
“You will get warm, if you will but lie quiet and not think about it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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