If Dan's humiliation down to this moment had not been gall and wormwood
to his proud and stubborn spirit the fault did not lie at the door of
Quayle the Gyke. Every indignity that an unwilling prisoner could have
been subjected to Dan underwent. From the moment of leaving the
court-house at Ramsey, Dan was pushed and huddled and imperiously
commanded with such an abundant lack of need and reason that at length
the people who crowded the streets or looked from their windows--the
same people, many of them, who had shrunk from Dan as he entered the
town--shouted at the coroner and groaned at him. But Dan himself, who
had never before accepted a blow from any man without returning it, was
seen to walk tamely by the coroner's side, towering above him in great
stature, but taking his rough handling like a child at his knees.
At the door of the prison where Quayle's function ended that of the
sumner began, and old Gorry was a man of another mold. Twenty times he
had taken charge of persons imprisoned six days for incontinence, and
once he had held the governor's wife twelve hours for slander, and once
again a fighting clergyman seven days for heresies in looking toward
Rome, but never before had he put man, woman, or child into the
pestilential hole under the floor of the old chapel. Dan he remembered
since the Bishop's son was a boy in corduroys, and when the rusty key of
the dungeon turned on him with a growl in its wards, and old Gorry went
shivering to the guard-room above and kindled himself a fire there and
sat and smoked, the good man under his rough surtout got the better of
the bad jailer. Then down he went again, and with a certain
shame-facedness, some half-comic, half-pathetic efforts of professional
reserve, he said he wouldn't object, not he, if Dan had a mind to come
up and warm himself. But Dan declined with words of cold thanks.
"No, Gorry," he said, "I don't know that I feel the cold."
"Oh, all right, all right, sit ye there, sit ye there," said Gorry. He
whipped about with as much of largeness as he could simulate, rattled
his keys as he went back, and even hummed a tune as he climbed the
narrow stairs. But, warming itself at the fire, the poor human nature in
the old man's breast began to tear him pitilessly. He could get no peace
for memories that would arise of the days when Dan plagued him sorely,
the sad little, happy dog. Then up he rose again, and down he went to
the dungeon once more.
"I respects the ould Bishop," he said, just by way of preliminary
apology and to help him to carry off his intention, "and if it be so
that a man _has_ done wrong I don't see--I don't see," he stammered, "it
isn't natheral that he should be starved alive anyway, and a cold
winter's night too."
"It's no more than I deserve," Dan mumbled; and at that word old Gorry
whipped about as before, repeating loftily, "Sit ye there, sit ye
there."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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