CHAPTER V.
A FEARFUL PLACE.
The wapentake entered behind Gwynplaine.
Then the justice of the quorum.
Then the constables.
The wicket was closed.
The heavy door swung to, closing hermetically on the stone sills,without any one seeing who had opened or shut it. It seemed as if thebolts re-entered their sockets of their own act. Some of thesemechanisms, the inventions of ancient intimidation, still exist in oldprisons--doors of which you saw no doorkeeper. With them the entrance toa prison becomes like the entrance to a tomb.
This wicket was the lower door of Southwark Jail.
There was nothing in the harsh and worm-eaten aspect of this prison tosoften its appropriate air of rigour.
Originally a pagan temple, built by the Catieuchlans for the Mogons,ancient English gods, it became a palace for Ethelwolf and a fortressfor Edward the Confessor; then it was elevated to the dignity of aprison, in 1199, by John Lackland. Such was Southwark Jail. This jail,at first intersected by a street, like Chenonceaux by a river, had beenfor a century or two a gate--that is to say, the gate of the suburb; thepassage had then been walled up. There remain in England some prisonsof this nature. In London, Newgate; at Canterbury, Westgate; atEdinburgh, Canongate. In France the Bastile was originally a gate.
Almost all the jails of England present the same appearance--a high wallwithout and a hive of cells within. Nothing could be more funereal thanthe appearance of those prisons, where spiders and justice spread theirwebs, and where John Howard, that ray of light, had not yet penetrated.Like the old Gehenna of Brussels, they might well have been designatedTreurenberg--_the house of tears_.
Men felt before such buildings, at once so savage and inhospitable, thesame distress that the ancient navigators suffered before the hell ofslaves mentioned by Plautus, islands of creaking chains,_ferricrepiditae insulae_, when they passed near enough to hear theclank of the fetters.
Southwark Jail, an old place of exorcisms and torture, was originallyused solely for the imprisonment of sorcerers, as was proved by twoverses engraved on a defaced stone at the foot of the wicket,--
Sunt arreptitii, vexati daemone multo Est energumenus, quem daemon possidet unus.
Lines which draw a subtle delicate distinction between the demoniac andman possessed by a devil.
At the bottom of this inscription, nailed flat against the wall, was astone ladder, which had been originally of wood, but which had beenchanged into stone by being buried in earth of petrifying quality at aplace called Apsley Gowis, near Woburn Abbey.
The prison of Southwark, now demolished, opened on two streets, betweenwhich, as a gate, it formerly served as means of communication. It hadtwo doors. In the large street a door, apparently used by theauthorities; and in the lane the door of punishment, used by the rest ofthe living and by the dead also, because when a prisoner in the jaildied it was by that issue that his corpse was carried out. A liberationnot to be despised. Death is release into infinity.
It was by the gate of punishment that Gwynplaine had been taken intoprison. The lane, as we have said, was nothing but a little passage,paved with flints, confined between two opposite walls. There is one ofthe same kind at Brussels called _Rue d'une Personne_. The walls wereunequal in height. The high one was the prison; the low one, thecemetery--the enclosure for the mortuary remains of the jail--was nothigher than the ordinary stature of a man. In it was a gate almostopposite the prison wicket. The dead had only to cross the street; thecemetery was but twenty paces from the jail. On the high wall wasaffixed a gallows; on the low one was sculptured a Death's head. Neitherof these walls made its opposite neighbour more cheerful.