It was on a close breathless day in September that Meg first saw Newgate.

Nearly fifty years have wrought many changes for the better (as well as some few for the worse) in London.

The Holborn Tom and Meg Thorpe walked down was more unsavoury, noisier, and far less regulated as to traffic than the Holborn of to-day.

The immense flow of people, the street cries, the jostling and bustling, were new to Meg; for, though she had lived in London half her life, she had never seen this side of it before.

All at once she understood how it had impressed Barnabas.

"He thinks London so terrible, and overpowering!" she said. "And I never knew what he meant! Now, I see——"

"Mind where ye are walkin'," said Tom. "Good Lord! If either o' ye had had one quarter o' a grain o' common-sense, ye'd ha' kept clear of a place where there's a many too many without ye, an' not room to hear one's own voice in! There! that's where he is!"

And Meg looked up at the gateway of the great prison, "the worst managed prison in England,"[1] where the scum and refuse of that human tide flowed constantly, and where, evil being most rampant, that cross that was originally raised between outragers of the public safety, was being raised again now by the hand of the Quaker lady, whom many yet unborn should call "blessed".

They passed under the fortress-like entrance, which Meg was to know well, in rain and snow, as well as in the autumn sunshine, which first softened its gloom to her, and stood among the crowd of prisoners' friends, who, on the whole, were a much more cheerful, not to say jovial set, than might have been expected.

The gatekeeper was exchanging jokes and winks with a noisy band of unbonneted girls, who were linked together arm in arm, and had "pals" inside.

Meg's soft heart warmed to one of them, who looked little more than a child, and who demanded permission to see her husband, Bill Jenkins, convicted of shop-lifting, and under sentence of death.

"I hope he will be reprieved," Meg said aloud. "She looks so very young to have a husband," she added apologetically to Tom, who was not over-pleased at her speaking to the girl.

There was a shout of laughter when some one who had overheard it repeated the remark.

"Bless your innocence, we've all got 'usbands, my dear," said one of the band. But it was not till later that the preacher's wife understood the meaning of their merriment.

The convicted were supposed to see only their wives, and that but once a week. "So I've never known a single man among 'em," the gatekeeper remarked with a grin. "Even the boys is all married,—every one on 'em!"

Meg could hardly have told what she had expected to encounter;—long stone passages, and a miserable cell, and Barnabas in heavy irons, and darkness, perhaps! She had been prepared to cheer and encourage him; but this noisy crew she was not prepared for, and her heart sank when she found that she was not admitted into the interior of the building; but could only take her place with the others on one side of a double row of iron railings, which interposed grimly between the prisoners and their friends.

Her strongest earliest impressions of a place she was to become familiar with during three long months were beer and bad language. The smell of the former assailed her nostrils; the sound of the latter, her ears; the place seemed reeking with both combined. She looked rather wistfully at the vendor of beer, who, coming straight from the public-house, fortunate enough to have secured Newgate's patronage, was greeted with acclamations, and allowed instant entrance to the wards.

"Eh, my lass, how are ye?" said the well-known voice, whose very familiarity sounded strange behind those bars. Margaret pressed her face against the iron, she was not able to reach him—the space between was too wide for that.

Prison uniform had not been instituted then, and the preacher was still in his blue jersey, which, however, showed a good many rents,—a fact which struck Meg at once; for Barnabas kept his clothes carefully mended as a rule. He looked ill, too, and his hair and beard were untrimmed; but his hands were unshackled, which was something of a relief to her.

He devoured her with his eyes hungrily, and asked question after question as to how she was, and how she had been, with an eagerness and insistence that left her little time to question him.

"I wish I could see ye better!" he cried impatiently. "Turn your head to the light, Margaret. I can't half see you in that thing!"

The straight side of her straw bonnet threw her face into shade, and she untied the strings, meaning to take it off to please him, remembering, with a slight tightening of the throat, how her father had proffered the same request; but Barnabas stopped her hastily.

"No, no. Not here!" he said. "Ye can't uncover your head for all those fellows to see. Ye hadn't ought to be here at all, wi' me not free to take care of ye. Where's Tom?"

"He is waiting for me, in the outer yard," said Meg. "Oh, Barnabas, I ought to have been here before; but I never heard till last night; indeed, if I had known, I would have come."

"I wasn't blamin' ye," he answered. "But look 'ee here, my lass; time's nearly up, and I've a deal to say that'll hardly get said now. I'm thinking this must be my last sight of ye till I'm free, or till——"

"There is no 'or,'" said Meg cheerfully. "Of course, they must set you free."

But she clung tighter to the rails; her knees felt weak with the long walk.

The preacher, looking at her, checked the reply that had almost risen to his lips.

"Till I am free then," he said. "But it's no place for you. Will 'ee go home wi' Tom? they'll be glad enough to have ye; or, if ye'd rayther, ye can stay wi' your sister. It's as ye like."

Then, with a sudden burst of longing, that seemed to cut through the heavy atmosphere, making Meg's heart give a bound; "To think that I can't give ye a roof!" he cried. "It warn't i' the bond that ye should follow me to Newgate! Ye must forgi'e me this, Margaret!"

Meg lifted her head and looked straight at him.

"I'm not going back to Laura," she said. "What should I do there? Nor to the farm; what business has your wife in L——shire, when you are here? Father has left me some money; it will be just enough to keep us together. I will take a room close to the prison, and come as often as they will let me. There is a great deal to talk of; there is your defence to be considered; there is a great deal to be done; and you have told me nothing yet. I will live on very little—as little as possible; we shall want every penny, but——"

He shook his head, and her voice changed from would-be cheerful assurance to entreaty.

"But let me stay!" she cried. "You will find it worth while. No one will work so hard for you as I will. If I were in prison should you go comfortably away with Tom to the farm? It is absurd to ask! You don't need to answer; for, of course, you wouldn't. Don't you want to see me? I could come three times a week; on all the visiting days—don't you think that would be something?"

"Something!" said the preacher. He put his hand before his eyes to hide the sight of her, who, he knew, was only too precious to him.

"The look of ye is more nor meat or drink to me," he said. "An' ye know it! An' it's just because o' that that there's no reason in comparing what I'd do wi' what I'd have ye do. Go back wi' Tom, lass. Ay, I knew ye'd be willin' to bide; I knew ye'd offer to; but I couldn't bear to see ye standin' here day after day, nor to think o' ye alone in this hell of a city. I'll do well enough, an' I won't forget ye begged to stop. Just say 'good-bye' to me, my dear, an' go. Go, my lass!"

Her hands dropped from the bars and she turned away. She was in the habit of obeying him, and his stronger will nearly always overpowered hers; but, as she turned she looked back, and, though she did not understand how or why, something in his weary attitude made her return quickly, with a little low cry that brought him close to the bars again.

"I want to stay," she said. "Barnabas, don't you see that I want to? You think I am saying this because I ought—for your sake. It is for my own. Ah, don't send me away; I want to stay."

He stood a moment silent; then: "Stay then," he said; "and God keep ye safe. Happen, after all, He knows how to as well as I do."

There was no time for more; she had to go, but the preacher drew a deep breath, as one amazed; the bolts and bars that divided them had also brought Margaret nearer to him. He had had need of some consolation.

The Gaol Acts laid down many most excellent rules, which the governors of Newgate seemed to consider were, like dreams, "to be read by contraries". Barnabas had found himself flung into an assembly where tried and untried—the boy accused of stealing a loaf, and the hardened old vagabond in for the tenth time—were all mixed up together, making a fine forcing bed for crime.

In the pursuit of his calling the preacher had been oftenest and most deeply attracted to places where evil was most prevalent; but it was one thing to attack the foul fiend of his own free will (and it must be owned Barnabas was seldom backward at assault), and another to be allowed no escape from the unclean presence by day or by night; no breathing space alone, even for a moment.

The unbearable sense of eyes always on him, the longing for fresh air, and, still more, for solitude, if only for five minutes, grew with a force that took all his strength to keep in bounds.

There had always been something gipsy-like in his restless impatience of walls and roofs. As a boy he had many a time crept out in order to sleep by preference with nothing between him and the sky. He held his very thoughts in check now, and durst not let them dwell on downs or sea, lest a mad passion for these should seize on him; but he ate with difficulty, forcing himself to swallow, loathing food, like some wild animal held in captivity; and sleep forsook him.

It was not till he had been in the gaol for a week that he began to discover a method in the madness of the prison arrangements; and the method roused him to protest so vigorous and unpopular as nearly to cost him his life.

To run atilt against established privileges, to refuse to let sleeping dogs lie, had always been main characteristics of the preacher; they never came out more strongly than in Newgate.

There are disadvantages in preaching righteousness while under accusation of attempted murder, and in attempting to right other people's grievances while a prisoner oneself; but such considerations never weighed with Barnabas. Where he saw his enemy, there he would "go" for him, whatever the situation might be.

On the women's side of the prison, Elizabeth Fry was already bringing order into disorder, light into the midst of darkness; but, on the men's side, misrule still ruled supreme.

The old prisoners levied a kind of blackmail on the others; they sold food, they winked at evil practices, they passed in tobacco and snuff, and, as wardsmen, their power was despotic.

In their hands was the placing of new arrivals, in their hands the drawing of briefs; they, practically, could feed or starve, bind or unbind; and one of the first things Barnabas did was to protest against the orders of a wardsman!

To do him justice, the preacher, though he had lamentably small sense of the expedient, was not naturally quarrelsome, and had rubbed shoulders against too many strange bedfellows to be over fastidious.

The crowded room in which the men slept together anyhow, under filthy mats on the floor, shocked him much less than it would shock any respectable member of society now-a-days. He relinquished his share of the rug, a third share; and stretched himself on the floor, as near to the window as he could get.

Everything was dirty; the men, the floor, and, not least, the conversation! Barnabas was glad that there was no glass in the windows, though not much fresh air seemed to make its way in anyhow. He had a great capability for abstracting himself from what was going on around him, and had been in bad places before,—though none, he was constrained to allow to himself, quite so bad as this. But when the key turned in the lock, shutting in for the night all these offscourings of the London streets; then, indeed, began a scene of mad drunken riot, of iniquity and cruelty, that pierced through his abstraction and forced him to attend.

He sat up in his corner, looking on with eyes that grew eager with desire to lift his testimony against the gambling and drinking and blasphemy that seemed to challenge him; but even he hesitated.

He was disheartened and sickened; he felt his faith low, his power to speak wanting. A sense of the certainty of failure, for once, deterred him; the strong impulse that carried other hearts was not present (possibly because he was physically tired, though this was a reason which would never have occurred to him), and he held his peace.

Of fear, in the sense of dread of personal harm to himself, he had little by nature and less by practice; but a deep moral depression and humility that underlay his boldness, and was less paradoxical than it at first seemed, sometimes closed his lips.

When the "spirit moved him," he would speak, nothing doubting; but, at times, he would sit in mental sackcloth, with no consciousness of Divine inspiration.

In the daytime, want of employment further depressed him; he had been accustomed all his life to hard exercise; and the comparative confinement of his London life had begun to tell on his health and spirits, even before his imprisonment. He would have been thankful for any form of labour,—a desire which certainly was not common among his companions. Not that the wards were devoid of amusement; papers and even books circulated freely, the last of a kind that increased the preacher's bigoted distaste for "book larning," and that he was, perhaps, justified in stigmatising as inventions of the devil! Tobacco and cards were also plentiful; gaming went on without intermission from morning till night, and of feasting and fighting there was plenty.

Barnabas would probably have come in for rough usage, even without any aggressive act on his part, had it not been for his size and strength, that made him so obviously an awkward subject to bully.

The bronzed, fair-bearded man, standing in his corner, "glowering" at a scene that, certainly, was brutal enough, had an expression in his blue eyes that looked as if he might be dangerous.

Possibly he was going mad! There was a large proportion of real lunatics in Newgate, and there were some sham ones, who feigned madness as the time of their trial approached; and their presence added to the insanely reckless character of the revels.

During the whole of the first week in prison, Barnabas had stood apart, silent and grave.

He was anxious about his wife; he was cast down by spiritual depression; and the sense that he was "forsaken of the Lord" was strong on him. Moreover,—and this was a thing that had rarely occurred to him,—he was tormented by uncertainty. It was against his instinct and principle to betray a confession; he would rather be hanged himself, as he had said to Margaret, than do that;—but yet, to leave the murderer free to commit any fresh crime that might be suggested to his depraved nature might lead to consequences from which even Barnabas, who seldom looked at consequences, shrank. All these causes, combined with the close atmosphere and want of sleep, weighed on him; he felt as if unable to pray, or to command his thoughts; he was "delivered over to Satan".

It was Margaret's visit that broke the spell. The sight of her, stirring his heart with most human love, roused him, and chased away the spiritual melancholy which was overpowering him. He became ashamed of his downheartedness.

He should stand at her side free again, and the sound of her last words nurtured a hope that he had often found it best not to dwell on overmuch,—would grim Newgate give him his wife's heart?

Shame on him for his cowardly depression! He deserved no favours, heavenly or earthly; but he would be depressed no longer. He went back to the yard after Margaret's visit with fresh spirit. Some of the prisoners had made a circle round a new-comer, a fair-haired lad of fifteen, who had the too girlish and refined "prettiness" that some fair-skinned boys retain so long, and who looked younger than he was.

The chaff and rough horse-play they were indulging in hardly amounted to actual ill-usage; but the boy looked frightened to death. He was singing in a high sweet treble, forced thereto by divers threats.

He evidently did not know the words of the song, for one of his self-constituted teachers kept prompting him, amid roars of laughter. It was a villainous song, and Barnabas hoped the lad didn't understand it. He had been brought in the day before, protesting his innocence in eager childish fashion,—as if it mattered to any one there whether he was innocent or not! At any rate, if he was when he entered, he hadn't much chance of being so when he should leave. Barnabas looked on in disgust for a few minutes, and then turned to a wardsman.

"Surely," he said, "that lad hadn't ought to be here?"

The middle yard in which they stood was supposed to be occupied by the most abandoned and worst class of criminals, men charged with the most revolting crimes; but the wardsmen of Newgate were apparently apt to consider the incorrigible offence, the offence of poverty (indeed, it is hard of cure) and an inability to pay ward dues, ranked the offender with the most depraved.

"Oh! you're the Lord Chief Justice in disguise, perhaps!" said the man. "Or his grace the Archbishop!"

"If I was the judge," said the preacher, "I'd far sooner ha' had that boy strung up to the nearest lamp post, guilty or no', than ha' pitchforked him in here, to ruin his body an' soul both! It 'ud ha' been a deal more merciful."

"Such a 'ighly moral cove as you 'ad better interfere," said the man. "The parson don't come in 'ere at present; he give up comin' after Hopping Jack took to assistin' him in 'is duties."

The speaker laughed silently over some hidden joke.

"He comes in just afore the 'angman now to the men as is fixed for 'anging, a sort of last grace before meat," he said. "They ain't so larky then."

Barnabas had not attended to the last remark; something he had heard or seen made his hand clench; and he turned on the wardsman hotly.

"Can ye do nothing, man?" he said. "You put that child here, because he couldn't pay th' ward dues (which be unlawful extortion anyway); he's only up for a matter o' stealin'; it 'ull lay at your door if those brutes make him——"

The rest of the sentence remained unfinished. Before he had got to the end of it, Barnabas had felt the appeal useless: the wardsman was momentarily staggered by the unprecedented and unbounded impudence of this new-comer; but, before he had even fully fathomed the whole extent of it, the preacher sprang into the middle of the ring, and stood by the boy's side.

There was a moment's absolute silence. Then Barnabas Thorpe's ringing voice pealed through the yard in a vigorous denunciation; he took the throng of reprobates so by surprise that he got through a whole sentence unmolested.

The motley crowd all stood and gaped; the boy clung to his arm.

Some men who were playing at leapfrog stopped, and stared; the dice fell from Hopping Jack's hand. If a thunder-clap, louder than usual, had broken out just over their heads, it would have produced just that effect, stunning and startling them. Then, with a howl of mingled laughter and anger, they all fell on the preacher at once; and the wardsman laughed silently again.

Barnabas fought desperately, first for the boy's sake, then in sheer self-defence; for his blows had enraged and roused the wild beast in these men. It was no joke now; they meant to punish him.

He set his teeth hard, and held his own for a short minute; but one to sixty is too heavy odds, and the righteous cause that triumphs in the end has a way of triumphing only through the blood of its upholders. He was down first on his knees, then on his face, then they all closed over him; he had not even taken the precaution to put his back against the yard wall, and his assailants were on all sides. He was down, and to kick a man on the ground was excellent sport, and this man had certainly brought it on himself. The wardsman usually interfered before things came to quite such a pass; but, on this occasion, he discreetly retired; the preacher had needed a lesson, and no one was in the least inclined to forbear.

The surgeon's report mentioned that one of the prisoners had had his ribs broken, but no further official notice was taken of this little episode; and the prisoner himself was rather surprised when he woke to consciousness (a highly disagreeable experience!), and found himself still alive, and lying in a corner of the ward, albeit without a square inch free from bruises, and with an odd sensation of having been kicked inside as well as out, making breathing a matter of pain.

He tried to sit upright, but the effort hurt him, turning him dizzy and sick; and he desisted.

"He's been shamefully mauled," some one was saying. "His own mother wouldn't know him. Done in a drunken brawl, I suppose? That's the second case from the middle yard within a fortnight. I should think you've about had your fill of fighting, eh? How do you feel?"

"Oncommon sore," said Barnabas; "but what became of th' lad?"

"He'll fare the worse for your interference," said the surgeon. "Keep still, or I can't fasten this bandage. Well, you've tried football from the ball's point of view. There's no accounting for tastes! Bless me, there's more bruise than whole skin about you; one might as well patch a stocking that's all holes!"

His fingers were not gentler than his words, but it was the latter that had made Barnabas wince. "What are they doin' wi' that boy? He's not a lad o' much spirit—I could see that; he'll be like wax in their hands, if some one don't interfere."

"They'll make it a point of honour to corrupt him as fast as possible now; you've gained that by interfering," said the surgeon. "But then the same result would have been reached in any case, sooner or later. If he wasn't a young blackguard when he came in, which I doubt, he'll take his degree in iniquity before the Assizes. It's no good struggling to get up, you can't! And what the devil are you in such a hurry for? You'd better digest the lesson they've given you."

The surgeon had no sympathy for Methodist preachers; the canting criminal, to which class he supposed Barnabas belonged, was the kind he liked least.

He had a cold tolerance for black sheep in general; "they were born bad, as was clearly proved by the shape of their skulls," he would remark; and, while he was a great advocate for hanging them for the sake of society, he neither regarded them with moral indignation, nor sympathised with the illogical efforts of philanthropists.

"You'll find it enough to occupy you," he added drily. He was struck, in spite of himself, at the way this man stood pain. "You'll feel that kicking worse in an hour. I must say it seems to have taken a good amount of beating to beat you!"

"I'd not say—I was beat—while I was alive," said Barnabas in gasps, for speaking was painful. "Ay, it's a lesson to me—I've been a bit too backward—ta'en up wi' my own affairs!—I desarved to fail—but I'll try again—so soon as I can stand. Beaten! I'm not beaten!"

Barnabas lay in his corner for three days and nights. He ought to have been put into the infirmary, but the infirmary was just then given up to certain political prisoners,—gentlemen who were decidedly out of place in Newgate, but who were made as comfortable as circumstances and the easy politeness of the governor allowed.

No one paid much heed to the preacher. It was a toss up whether he lived or died; but his hardy constitution, and, perhaps, his innate obstinacy, pulled him through. On the fourth day after the surgeon's visit he sat upright, on the fifth he struggled to his feet. The fifth day happened to be a Sunday, which, by a time-honoured custom, was a day set apart and sacred to free fights in the middle yard. Barnabas steadied himself, with one hand against the wall, and looked around him. He did not remember ever before to have felt physically weak. The sensation struck him as very curious.

"You'll not be trying that game again," remarked his enemy, the wardsman.

Barnabas Thorpe was a gaunt and ghastly sight, standing on his straw with the blood-stained bandage across his forehead. His face was whitened by confinement, and lined and hollowed by pain; but the sneer brought the light of battle into his blue eyes.

"Will I not?" he said grimly. "Wait an' see, man! This time we play to win."

"We? Who's fool enough to be on your side?" asked the man.

"I am on His," said Barnabas. "He leads!" He made his way along the ward while he spoke, stumbling more than once, panting from sheer weakness; and the wardsman followed, grinning.

All the men were out in the yard. Two of them were fighting, the rest were applauding. The preacher walked through the ring, and put his hands on the combatants' shoulders.

"Ye'll do that no more," he said. "It is my Master's day, an' He is here among us; an' to Him shall be the power an' th' glory."

He was so exhausted by the walk that he involuntarily leaned heavily on the man whose arm he had touched, and who stood and gaped, with awe-struck face.

In his full strength and vigour the preacher had failed—in his weakness he conquered.

So long as man is man, he must perforce bow down before the spark of Divinity that makes him human—when he sees it.

These gaol birds and outcasts "saw it" that day; saw it in the courage that had nothing to do with the animal and physical side of our nature; "saw it" in the command given by one whom they had trampled on, and well-nigh killed, who, knowing what he risked, yet risked it again, counting death no defeat.

"Let 'im be. You can't hurt such as 'im," one of the men whispered. "He's got them standin' by him."