So saying, he went out abruptly, leaving his petitioner with his eyes fixed ruefully upon the door by which his last hope had left him.

The moment the reverend official had got outside the door, his countenance, which had fallen, took a complacent air.  He prided himself that he had conquered an impulse, an idle impulse.

“The poor fellow is in the right,” said he to himself as he left the cell; “but if I had let him see I thought so, he might have been encouraged to resist, and then he would have only suffered all the more.”

And so, having done what he calculated was the expedient thing to do, he went his way satisfied and at peace with Mr. Hawes and all mankind.

When he glided away and took hope with him, disdain, despair and frenzy gushed from the thief’s boiling bosom in one wild moan; and with that moan he dashed himself on his face on the floor, though it was as hard as Hawes and cold as Jones.

Thus he lay crushed in blank despair a moment, the next he rose fiercely to his knees, he looked up through the hole they called his window, and saw a little piece of blue sky no bigger than a Bible, he held his hand up to that blue sky, he fixed his dilating eye on that blue sky, and with one long raging yell of horrible words hurled from a heart set on fire by wrongs and despair and tempting fiends, he cursed the successor of the apostles before the Majesty of Heaven.

CHAPTER XIII.

SOLITUDE is no barrier whatever to sin.  Such prayers as Robinson’s are a disgrace to those who provoke them, but a calamity to him who utters them.  Robinson was now a far worse man than ever he had been out of prison.  The fiend had fixed a claw in his heart, and we may be sure he felt the recoil of his ill prayers.  He hated the human race, which produced such creatures as Hawes and nothing to keep them in check.

“From this hour I speak no more to any of those beasts!”

Such was his resolve, made with clinched teeth and nails.  And he curled himself up like a snake and turned his back upon mankind, and his face to the wall.  Robinson had begun his career in this place full of hopes.  He hoped by good conduct to alleviate his condition as he had done in other jails; conscious of various talents, he hoped by skill as well as by good conduct to better his condition even in a jail.  Such hopes are a part of our nature, and were not in his case unreasonable.  These hopes were soon extinguished.  He came down to a confident hope that by docility and good conduct he should escape all evils except those inseparable from a prisoner’s lot.

When he discovered that Hawes loved to punish his prisoners, and indeed could hardly get through the day without it, and that his crank was an unavoidable trap to catch the prisoners and betray them to punishment, he sunk lower and lower in despondency, till at last there was but one bit of blue hope in all his horizon.  He still hoped something against tyranny and cruelty from the representative of the gospel of mercy in the place.  But when his reverence told him nothing was to be expected from that quarter, his last hope went out and he was in utter darkness.