Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty
downstairs, the bearer reported her either dead or dying; and being at
some loss what to do with her, was looking round for a convenient bench
or heap of ashes on which to place her senseless form, when she suddenly
came upon her feet by some mysterious means, thrust back her hair,
stared wildly at Mr Tappertit, cried, ‘My Simmuns’s life is not a
wictim!’ and dropped into his arms with such promptitude that he
staggered and reeled some paces back, beneath his lovely burden.
‘Oh bother!’ said Mr Tappertit. ‘Here. Catch hold of her, somebody. Lock
her up again; she never ought to have been let out.’
‘My Simmun!’ cried Miss Miggs, in tears, and faintly. ‘My for ever, ever
blessed Simmun!’
‘Hold up, will you,’ said Mr Tappertit, in a very unresponsive tone,
‘I’ll let you fall if you don’t. What are you sliding your feet off the
ground for?’
‘My angel Simmuns!’ murmured Miggs--‘he promised--’
‘Promised! Well, and I’ll keep my promise,’ answered Simon, testily. ‘I
mean to provide for you, don’t I? Stand up!’
‘Where am I to go? What is to become of me after my actions of this
night!’ cried Miggs. ‘What resting-places now remains but in the silent
tombses!’
‘I wish you was in the silent tombses, I do,’ cried Mr Tappertit, ‘and
boxed up tight, in a good strong one. Here,’ he cried to one of the
bystanders, in whose ear he whispered for a moment: ‘Take her off, will
you. You understand where?’
The fellow nodded; and taking her in his arms, notwithstanding her
broken protestations, and her struggles (which latter species of
opposition, involving scratches, was much more difficult of resistance),
carried her away. They who were in the house poured out into the street;
the locksmith was taken to the head of the crowd, and required to walk
between his two conductors; the whole body was put in rapid motion;
and without any shouts or noise they bore down straight on Newgate, and
halted in a dense mass before the prison-gate.
Chapter 64
Breaking the silence they had hitherto preserved, they raised a great
cry as soon as they were ranged before the jail, and demanded to speak
to the governor. This visit was not wholly unexpected, for his house,
which fronted the street, was strongly barricaded, the wicket-gate of
the prison was closed up, and at no loophole or grating was any person
to be seen. Before they had repeated their summons many times, a man
appeared upon the roof of the governor’s house, and asked what it was
they wanted.
Some said one thing, some another, and some only groaned and hissed. It
being now nearly dark, and the house high, many persons in the throng
were not aware that any one had come to answer them, and continued their
clamour until the intelligence was gradually diffused through the whole
concourse. Ten minutes or more elapsed before any one voice could be
heard with tolerable distinctness; during which interval the figure
remained perched alone, against the summer-evening sky, looking down
into the troubled street.
‘Are you,’ said Hugh at length, ‘Mr Akerman, the head jailer here?’
‘Of course he is, brother,’ whispered Dennis. But Hugh, without minding
him, took his answer from the man himself.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’
‘You have got some friends of ours in your custody, master.’
‘I have a good many people in my custody.’ He glanced downward, as
he spoke, into the jail: and the feeling that he could see into the
different yards, and that he overlooked everything which was hidden from
their view by the rugged walls, so lashed and goaded the mob, that they
howled like wolves.
‘Deliver up our friends,’ said Hugh, ‘and you may keep the rest.’
‘It’s my duty to keep them all. I shall do my duty.’
‘If you don’t throw the doors open, we shall break ‘em down,’ said Hugh;
‘for we will have the rioters out.’
‘All I can do, good people,’ Akerman replied, ‘is to exhort you to
disperse; and to remind you that the consequences of any disturbance in
this place, will be very severe, and bitterly repented by most of you,
when it is too late.’
He made as though he would retire when he said these words, but he was
checked by the voice of the locksmith.
‘Mr Akerman,’ cried Gabriel, ‘Mr Akerman.’
‘I will hear no more from any of you,’ replied the governor, turning
towards the speaker, and waving his hand.
‘But I am not one of them,’ said Gabriel. ‘I am an honest man, Mr
Akerman; a respectable tradesman--Gabriel Varden, the locksmith. You
know me?’
‘You among the crowd!’ cried the governor in an altered voice.
‘Brought here by force--brought here to pick the lock of the great door
for them,’ rejoined the locksmith. ‘Bear witness for me, Mr Akerman,
that I refuse to do it; and that I will not do it, come what may of my
refusal. If any violence is done to me, please to remember this.’
‘Is there no way of helping you?’ said the governor.
‘None, Mr Akerman. You’ll do your duty, and I’ll do mine. Once again,
you robbers and cut-throats,’ said the locksmith, turning round upon
them, ‘I refuse. Ah! Howl till you’re hoarse. I refuse.’
‘Stay--stay!’ said the jailer, hastily. ‘Mr Varden, I know you for
a worthy man, and one who would do no unlawful act except upon
compulsion--’
‘Upon compulsion, sir,’ interposed the locksmith, who felt that the tone
in which this was said, conveyed the speaker’s impression that he had
ample excuse for yielding to the furious multitude who beset and hemmed
him in, on every side, and among whom he stood, an old man, quite alone;
‘upon compulsion, sir, I’ll do nothing.’
‘Where is that man,’ said the keeper, anxiously, ‘who spoke to me just
now?’
‘Here!’ Hugh replied.
‘Do you know what the guilt of murder is, and that by keeping that
honest tradesman at your side you endanger his life!’
‘We know it very well,’ he answered, ‘for what else did we bring him
here? Let’s have our friends, master, and you shall have your friend. Is
that fair, lads?’
The mob replied to him with a loud Hurrah!
‘You see how it is, sir?’ cried Varden. ‘Keep ‘em out, in King George’s
name. Remember what I have said. Good night!’
There was no more parley. A shower of stones and other missiles
compelled the keeper of the jail to retire; and the mob, pressing on,
and swarming round the walls, forced Gabriel Varden close up to the
door.
In vain the basket of tools was laid upon the ground before him, and
he was urged in turn by promises, by blows, by offers of reward, and
threats of instant death, to do the office for which they had brought
him there. ‘No,’ cried the sturdy locksmith, ‘I will not!’
He had never loved his life so well as then, but nothing could move him.
The savage faces that glared upon him, look where he would; the cries of
those who thirsted, like wild animals, for his blood; the sight of men
pressing forward, and trampling down their fellows, as they strove to
reach him, and struck at him above the heads of other men, with axes and
with iron bars; all failed to daunt him. He looked from man to man, and
face to face, and still, with quickened breath and lessening colour,
cried firmly, ‘I will not!’
Dennis dealt him a blow upon the face which felled him to the ground. He
sprung up again like a man in the prime of life, and with blood upon his
forehead, caught him by the throat.
‘You cowardly dog!’ he said: ‘Give me my daughter. Give me my daughter.’
They struggled together. Some cried ‘Kill him,’ and some (but they were
not near enough) strove to trample him to death. Tug as he would at the
old man’s wrists, the hangman could not force him to unclench his hands.
‘Is this all the return you make me, you ungrateful monster?’ he
articulated with great difficulty, and with many oaths.
‘Give me my daughter!’ cried the locksmith, who was now as fierce as
those who gathered round him: ‘Give me my daughter!’
He was down again, and up, and down once more, and buffeting with a
score of them, who bandied him from hand to hand, when one tall fellow,
fresh from a slaughter-house, whose dress and great thigh-boots smoked
hot with grease and blood, raised a pole-axe, and swearing a horrible
oath, aimed it at the old man’s uncovered head. At that instant, and in
the very act, he fell himself, as if struck by lightning, and over his
body a one-armed man came darting to the locksmith’s side. Another man
was with him, and both caught the locksmith roughly in their grasp.
‘Leave him to us!’ they cried to Hugh--struggling, as they spoke, to
force a passage backward through the crowd. ‘Leave him to us. Why do you
waste your whole strength on such as he, when a couple of men can finish
him in as many minutes! You lose time. Remember the prisoners! remember
Barnaby!’
The cry ran through the mob. Hammers began to rattle on the walls; and
every man strove to reach the prison, and be among the foremost rank.
Fighting their way through the press and struggle, as desperately as if
they were in the midst of enemies rather than their own friends, the two
men retreated with the locksmith between them, and dragged him through
the very heart of the concourse.
And now the strokes began to fall like hail upon the gate, and on the
strong building; for those who could not reach the door, spent their
fierce rage on anything--even on the great blocks of stone, which
shivered their weapons into fragments, and made their hands and arms to
tingle as if the walls were active in their stout resistance, and dealt
them back their blows. The clash of iron ringing upon iron, mingled
with the deafening tumult and sounded high above it, as the great
sledge-hammers rattled on the nailed and plated door: the sparks flew
off in showers; men worked in gangs, and at short intervals relieved
each other, that all their strength might be devoted to the work; but
there stood the portal still, as grim and dark and strong as ever, and,
saving for the dints upon its battered surface, quite unchanged.
While some brought all their energies to bear upon this toilsome task;
and some, rearing ladders against the prison, tried to clamber to the
summit of the walls they were too short to scale; and some again engaged
a body of police a hundred strong, and beat them back and trod them
under foot by force of numbers; others besieged the house on which the
jailer had appeared, and driving in the door, brought out his furniture,
and piled it up against the prison-gate, to make a bonfire which should
burn it down. As soon as this device was understood, all those who had
laboured hitherto, cast down their tools and helped to swell the heap;
which reached half-way across the street, and was so high, that those
who threw more fuel on the top, got up by ladders. When all the keeper’s
goods were flung upon this costly pile, to the last fragment, they
smeared it with the pitch, and tar, and rosin they had brought, and
sprinkled it with turpentine. To all the woodwork round the prison-doors
they did the like, leaving not a joist or beam untouched. This infernal
christening performed, they fired the pile with lighted matches and with
blazing tow, and then stood by, awaiting the result.
The furniture being very dry, and rendered more combustible by wax
and oil, besides the arts they had used, took fire at once. The flames
roared high and fiercely, blackening the prison-wall, and twining up
its loftly front like burning serpents. At first they crowded round the
blaze, and vented their exultation only in their looks: but when it grew
hotter and fiercer--when it crackled, leaped, and roared, like a great
furnace--when it shone upon the opposite houses, and lighted up not only
the pale and wondering faces at the windows, but the inmost corners of
each habitation--when through the deep red heat and glow, the fire was