In all the crime and vice and moral gloom of
the great pest-house of the capital, he stood alone, marked and singled
out by his great guilt, a Lucifer among the devils. The other prisoners
were a host, hiding and sheltering each other--a crowd like that without
the walls. He was one man against the whole united concourse; a single,
solitary, lonely man, from whom the very captives in the jail fell off
and shrunk appalled.
It might be that the intelligence of his capture having been bruited
abroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out and kill him in
the street; or it might be that they were the rioters, and, in pursuance
of an old design, had come to sack the prison. But in either case he had
no belief or hope that they would spare him. Every shout they raised,
and every sound they made, was a blow upon his heart. As the attack went
on, he grew more wild and frantic in his terror: tried to pull away the
bars that guarded the chimney and prevented him from climbing up: called
loudly on the turnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from the
fury of the rabble; or put him in some dungeon underground, no matter
of what depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset with rats and
creeping things, so that it hid him and was hard to find.
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