by Major Arthur Griffiths, author of "The Chronicles of Newgate," "Fast and Loose," etc.
As published in Strange Doings in Strange Places (Cassell & Company, Ltd.; 1890), originally published in Cassell's Saturday Journal.
I.
"To think that I should live to see this day!" said old Asa Sharland, the gate-keeper—he had been "on the lock" for thirty odd years—as he opened the grim portals of the Ryechester County Gaol for the last time. Its occupation and his were gone. The gates, so jealously guarded for generations, opened and shut with all the pomp and particularity of a stronghold consecrated to the service of justice, would be needed no more. The gaol from henceforth would be perpetually empty of prisoners. The fiat of authority had gone forth to discontinue it as a place of confinement, and the massive, mediæval-looking building, with its tall, black façade frowning over its lofty walls, shorn of its real purpose, was like the inert carcase of a strong man suddenly deprived of life.
Fate had been hard to Asa Sharland in recent days. Troubles had fallen thickly upon him. His wife, a loving helpmate through a long course of happy years, had died; the misconduct of a scape-grace, only son, had broken her heart. This son had disappeared in circumstances that brought shame upon the honest, law-abiding old official. Now Asa was to be exiled, as he thought, from the home of his youth. He had been born in the gaol lodge, where his father had held the same office before him; he had hoped to die there, succeeded by the son who had early gone astray. Nothing remained to cheer his declining years but the love of his daughter Sabina—a sweet and proper maiden enough; but she, after the manner of maidens, was sharpening another shaft by fixing her affections upon a man of whom her father would not approve.
From mere habit, Asa Sharland closed the gates with a clang. He barred and treble locked them, although there was no longer need for these precautions. The gaol had ceased to be a place of security. It was a howling wilderness rather, deserted by every occupant, voluntary or involuntary, save this one lonely, sorrowful old man and his daughter Sabina, who lived with him in the lodge. The governor was gone—pensioned off; so were the warders—pensioned or transferred to other gaols; the prison population, unreplenished by new committals, had dwindled down till this very morning the last official had set the last rogue free. Sharland would shortly follow; his exodus was close at hand; but for the moment he was to be left in charge of the empty buildings, custodian or caretaker for the Government, holding on from week to week until it was settled whether the ancient edifice should be left standing, or sold, or razed to the ground.
Sadly he made his rounds through narrow, well-like courts, along echoing corridors, visiting the untenanted cells, old fashioned, dark, and ill ventilated. Enlightened public opinion had long condemned this ancient gaol as an anachronism, lamentably behind-hand, and out of all keeping with modern ideas. Sharland could see nothing wrong with it. He was proud of every rusty bolt and bar, of every gloomy, poisonous recess, of every stone worn by centuries of weary footsteps, imprinted with iliads of voiceless complaint. Here was the condemned cell, the ante-chamber to the scaffold. In one corner was the very table, a huge slab of stone, on which the executioner had disembowelled traitors. The very knife and fork on which he held the entrails aloft were there in the gaol museum, with a ghastly collection of gyves that had manacled notorious murderers, the weapons that had served them in their hellish work, and the hangman's rope that had repaid them. There was the debtors' yard, a small space barely a few feet square, where once hundreds were crowded—men, women, and children—starving on the pittance their creditors supplied. Down below were the blind underground oubliettes, where rumour said the victims of intolerance and oppression were left to rot, like rats in a sealed-up sewer.
A solitary walk through the grim and ghostly passages of the deserted gaol was not calculated to improve old Sharland's spirits, or sweeten his temper. When he reached the lodge and found Sabina, his daughter, in the bright, snug kitchen, herself a bright, pleasant object, with her trim figure and smiling face, the greeting she got was discouraging—half groan, half growl. Yet she had something to say to her father, and, brave girl, his surly aspect could not restrain her.
"Father," she said, as they sat down to the mid-day meal, "I have heard—they tell me—that, that—Reuben has returned."
"Not here. He shall never cross this threshold again!" cried her father, excitedly. "I will not see him! I will never look upon his face again!" The tears filled Sabina's eyes as she dropped them sadly, and sat silent, with nervously twitching hands.
"Who has seen him? When? Where? What was he doing?" cried the father, eager, in spite of all, to know all the worst—about his errant, peccant son.
"The sergeant—Sergeant Copthorne met him."
"I thought as much. The sergeant met Reuben, and you met the sergeant. He sees my disgraced son, and my disobedient daughter sees him. Have I not forbidden it, Sabina? Told you a dozen times or more that I shall have no dealings, no truck, with Copthorne, that I will not tolerate him?"
"Sergeant Copthorne is true and honest, father. He is well thought of; he is certain to rise in the force. I like him. Why will you be so cruelly against him?"
"He serves the Borough. No man who owns the Corporation for master can be welcome to me."
This was another of old Sharland's griefs. He had an intense hatred and contempt for the Borough of Ryechester and its authorities. There had long been a bitter rivalry between County and Corporation. The City was prosperous and go ahead; the Shire aristocratic, but impecunious. A few years back, the Corporation had spent large sums on a brand-new model prison, putting the old County Gaol utterly to shame by contrast; and when choice had to be made between the two, as to which should be permanently retained, preference naturally was shown to the modern and more suitable structure. This was an affront put upon the county, which all who served it resented and repaid by scorn and depreciation. Asa Sharland, one of the oldest of county officials, even suffered his party spirit to cross his threshold, and embitter his domestic relations.
II.
As time passed, the unhappy gatekeeper had found more and more reason to quarrel with his fate. To his unutterable disgust, both he and his edifice were now under the borough jurisdiction. The Government was nominally his master, but the salary it allowed him as caretaker was paid to him by the governor of the Borough Gaol. The latter, a pompous upstart, who had once been his comrade and fellow warder, now came to the County Gaol assuming airs of authority; critically examining its contents, and, where things pleased him, ordering their immediate transfer to his own hateful establishment. By degrees, Sharland saw the old gaol robbed and gutted before his very eyes. There was no end to the spoliation. The condemned cell itself was threatened, and the Museum of Horrors, with all its ghastly contents, was to be removed bodily to the Town Hall.
"I wonder he don't dig up the bodies in the burial ground"—a narrow strip within the walls, where the hangman's victims were deposited as soon as they were cut down. "It's enough to make them turn in their graves, or get up and walk the gaol."
This was his sad reflection one night as he made his perambulation of the gaol, a duty he had neglected of late. What need was there for him to visit and inspect the empty shell, only peopled, as he thought, with memories of the happier, busier past? He carried a lantern, well as he knew his road. But there were many pitfalls for unwary feet: stairs dropping suddenly, sharp angles at unexpected corners, and hidden flights of stairs; while solid, iron-bound barrier gates, secured by chains or ponderous bolts, barred every twist and turn of the low, vaulted corridor he was threading. Meaning to return the way he came, he had left every door wide open as he passed through. They were doors that called for all his strength to swing; many hundredweight each of them, hung on rasping hinges now innocent of oil.
What was that? He halted all at once: pulled up short and sharp by a sound like the din of a great explosion; it might have been a thunder clap, or the discharge of some great gun. One of the doors, the most distant from where he stood, had closed—banged to—of itself, or by some unknown agency. But what—or whose?
While he still wondered, startled—nay, terrified—there was a second similar report. A third and a fourth followed. All the doors that interposed between him and the first were banged, or banged themselves, one after another, each with a louder report, till the last of this long salvo of mysterious artillery, only a few paces from him, went off with a final tremendous crash, followed by a swift current of cold air, in which his lantern was extinguished.
He stood there immovable. He could not say how long.
It was at a particularly gruesome spot too. Hard by were the condemned cells. Close at hand was the grim platform on which the law's "finisher" carried out the last penalty. There lay the mortuary, the dead house, where the bodies, cut down from the gallows, were bestowed in shells filled with quicklime, awaiting interment in their nameless graves below. The surroundings intensified the horror of his situation. An awful stillness had succeeded the strange disturbance. He was in black darkness, too, and alone!
Nay, was he alone? A vague sense that Something—some preternatural presence—hovered near, that fiery eyes glared at him through the impenetrable gloom, that voices, weird and wailing, broke the prevailing silence.
His hair stood erect; the shiver of prickly goose flesh shook his frame; all his pulses quickened; yet his feet seemed rooted to the spot. He might have stood there for hours, but for a second and more terrifying shock. A blaze of spectral light throbbed out suddenly, and as quickly died away. It came and went again from the direction of the condemned cell, accompanied in each pulsation by a hideous yell of unearthly laughter, which woke every echo in the place. Now, old Asa Sharland, although utterly unnerved, found the use of his limbs, and fled for his life.
He made straight, and by the most direct route, for the front of the gaol, where his quarters were—in the lodge, looking out on the street. He panted for the outer air, for a sight of the gas lamps, for the sounds and society, however distant, of his fellow men. At any other time he would have been surprised and greatly annoyed to find that the small wicket in the main entrance gates was open, and that his daughter was gossiping with some one outside. All he did was to gasp out, "Pina! Bina!" and seize her arm.
"Oh, father: please. I am so sorry, but David came on purpose to say, to tell you, that—" the girl began, conscience-stricken, eager to explain.
"David? David?" repeated the old gate-keeper, quite vacantly, at first; adding, as he remembered, but with no shade of anger in his tones, "What, Copthorne, the sergeant; is he out there? Call him in, Bina; call him in."
The police sergeant, doubtful of his reception, followed rather sheepishly into the kitchen; a fine, stalwart young man, whose face impressed you with its solid, honest worth, rather than its quick-witted intelligence. But Bina had brains for both: an alert, bright-eyed maiden, she knew herself her sweet-heart's superior, but, by the rule of contrariness that governs such matters, loved him all the more for that.
"Bina! Sergeant!" gasped old Sharland, as they stood waiting, a little uncomfortably, before him; "there is something wrong inside: something terrible has happened; I think there are ghosts in the gaol!" And in a weak, agitated voice, he recounted what had occurred.
The sergeant put on his official manner at once. It was his duty to "investigate" the facts, after the manner of policemen puzzled.
"Is this the first time you have noticed anything queer?" he asked.
"I've not been that way this week or more. Last time was with Mr. Lockitt, the governor of the Borough Gaol, when he talked of removing the museum. It's my belief they don't like it."
"They?" interrupted Bina, with a scornful laugh. "What, all those bits of rope and rusty knives?"
"Not them things, of course. But those as used them and now lie buried below the flags of the yard. If they'd only lie there!"
"I think we ought to examine the scene of the disturbance," said the sergeant, thoughtfully. This was what he had been taught as the first step in every inquiry.
Old Asa was very loth to re-enter the precincts of the possessed gaol, but he was shamed into taking up his keys when his daughter declared she would accompany them.
The three crossed the yard that interposed, like a little flagged forecourt, between the gates and the now quite deserted governor's residence. The latter stood, as was once the invariable rule, in the very heart and centre of the gaol. The topmost storey of this building was occupied by the prison chapel, while in the court, in the very basement, was the entrance to the winding corridor where Sharland had been so terrified, and which on this level made the circuit of the gaol.
Hardly were they committed to this subterranean passage than they were startled by another strangely mysterious sound: a strain of music, faint and distant, but unmistakably weird and plaintive in tone.
"It comes from the chapel: some one is playing the harmonium!" said Bina, declining to take fright. "Who could have got in there?"
"Let's go and see," suggested the sergeant, bravely.
"No, no," protested old Sharland. "Not while. they're there. It's no one from outside. How could any one get in without our knowing? We have the keys. The gates are always locked: unless you, Bina, let some one pass while my back was turned!"
"Not I, father. If they came in it must have been over the wall, or under it, or through the key-holes."
"Don't jest, child!" said her father, angrily. "It makes me shudder. They might take offence, and pay us off in some awful fashion."
"Are we going to stay here all night, father?" asked Bina, abrupt and bold. "Which shall it be? Up to the chapel, or keep straight on?"
They decided on the former course, and took the nearest of the many approaches to the chapel, a winding, enclosed staircase that led past the governor's quarters to a door that opened directly into his pew. This pew was in a small gallery, all by itself, raised high above the body of the chapel, with curtains that ensured its privacy, but which did not prevent the chief authority of the place from surveying all below. Other means of access to the chapel were afforded by light iron bridges thrown across from the various. blocks of prison buildings around.
III.
Bina, who was first, listened at the door directly she reached it. The music was still wailing within, accompanied by a wild, weird chant, rather Satanic than sacred, and sounding terrible in a church. Outwardly undaunted, although her heart was palpitating, she would have gone forward, through the door which was unlocked, into the governor's pew, and actually into the chapel itself, when they heard the door slam on the foot of the stairs.
"There!" cried her father, hysterically. "Just the same thing as before; they want to shut us in for the night."
"You have the key. Go down and open it again," said Bina. Perhaps you'll find it shut quite naturally.
Seeing Sharland hesitate, she bade her lover accompany him; and when they pressed her to go too, said—
"No, no. I'm not afraid. I'll stay here till you get back. I shall be all right. Besides, you'll be within call all the time."
So they left her, and while she waited—the music and fiendish hymn never ceasing—her woman's curiosity imperiously impelled her to venture further and just to look inside. With the utmost caution she turned the handle, and crept noiselessly into the roomy and curtained pew.
A wan, sickly light filled all the chapel. She was conscious of that as soon as she had passed within. A light, insufficient to illumine objects fully, but in which, peering through the curtains, she could just distinguish a crowd of white-robed, ghostly figures weaving a fantastic, fiendish dance in and out among the benches below. One principal figure stood out alone, just in front of the altar rails, acting as a sort of Corypheus, or leader of the revels, beating time to the ghastly music, and stamping his feet. There was something familiar to Bina in this chief figure: he bore a shadowy, ghostly resemblance to—
And then, stifling the cry—anguish, terror, or surprise, or all three were forcing on her—she rushed back to the door of the pew, and meeting her father and her lover, then just returned, quickly imparted to them the panic which seemed to possess her, and all three descended, hastily, ignominiously to the now unlocked door below.
"What was it, Bina? What did you see?" both asked as soon as they were back in the lodge kitchen.
The girl was now agitated—distressed beyond measure; yet she would not admit it, or describe what she had seen or heard.
Both the men pressed her. "We ought to know all about it, Bina. You're more frightened than I was, I can see that," said her father. "And that settles me. We'll clear out of the gaol to-morrow, first thing."
"No, no, father," Bina said, eagerly, assuming a fictitious courage, but why was not so clear. "It would be too cowardly."
"Any way, I would first recommend a close inspection of all parts of the prison in broad daylight. We shall see then, perhaps, whether any evil-disposed persons can have got access," said the sergeant.
Again Bina negatived the suggestion.
"Better do nothing at all," she said. "It might not be safe to go inside the gaol, either by day or night. Just leave it to itself. Perhaps the trouble will pass over in a day or two. And if we ran away, what would people think of us—especially if nothing more was heard?"
Bina's argument was somewhat contradictory. They would have failed to convince any calmer or more independent listeners. But her father was too much upset to use calm judgment, and the sergeant's rather sluggish brain ceased to act when his sweetheart took command. Bina, too, with a woman's dexterity, straightway left the subject, and turned the talk into other channels—the gossip of the hour, the prospects in the police, the prevalence of crime, attributable by Sharland entirely to the closing of one gaol, and especially the many and daring burglaries from which the city had lately suffered.
"They are that clever!" said Copthorne. "And the big way they work, sweeping off everything, heavy and light goods, furniture, bales of cloth, jewellery, cases of wine, groceries, and what not!"
"Ah, if I could only run some of these chaps in!" he continued. "It would be worth a lot to me. Promotion right off! And when I am an inspector!" The honest fellow looked at his love and then at her father. All obstacles to the match would then be withdrawn.
Bina, strange to say, did not appear interested, much as the chances of speedy promotion meant to Copthorne and to her. She seemed distraught: absorbed in her own thoughts. The two men attributed her strange, absent manner to the terror of her recent experiences.
But Bina Sharland showed little fear an hour later when, the lodge being closed for the night, the visitor gone, her father asleep upstairs, and all quiet within the gaol, she came out stealthily, but with firm step, into the kitchen. In one corner stood the key-safe, to which any one since the exodus of the prisoners might have access, and from it she extracted the key of the wicket door in the main gate. The hour was late—long past one a.m.; no one was about in the street, and she boldly let herself out, leaving the wicket gate ajar. Then she skirted the massive boundary wall to where the ground sloped quickly down to a lower level, intersected by an old, more or less disused canal, which served practically as a sort of outer defence; a modern moat hemming in the gaol upon this side. Down below there were no dwellings. It was a lonely, deserted spot, which no one frequented much, and less than ever now that the building above had ceased from its functions as a gaol.
The towing path was on the side she walked, at the foot of the sheer straight cliff. Above rose the black gaol, severely outlined against the pale night sky. Following the path, which curved and twisted round many corners, she came upon a recessed door, a practicable opening in the cliff, not unlike the entrance to a sewer. It was evidently the desire to inspect this door that had brought Bina here, for she stopped, and striking match after match, held the feeble light to the fastenings, examining them closely, the hinges and the jambs.
"Yes," she said, softly, "it has been opened recently—within the last few days—perhaps the last few hours. I begin to understand;" and, as if satisfied, she turned back, preparing to retrace her steps towards the gaol, when she paused, arrested by a strange new sound which broke the stillness of the night.
The splash and ripple of water; something moving in the canal—a boat or barge—slowly approaching, towed from the path by people whose footsteps and voices, low-spoken, became also distinguishable.
Filled with sudden terror, Bina fled, fully expecting to be overtaken, seized, questioned. But arrived at the point where was the ascent to the gaol, she fancied that the sounds behind had ceased already, and that the boat's progress had been stopped somewhere short of where she was. With a beating heart, she crept cautiously back, determined to unravel the mystery if she could. There was the boat—a low, dark object—casting its long reflections on the glassy surface of the canal, moored exactly opposite the door she had but just examined. Figures were coming and going between it and the boat, which they were loading up with bundles and bales. The voices were no longer low, but loud and eager; and above them all was one she plainly recognised, fiercer and more authoritative than the rest.
"Look sharp! You have only a couple of hours before dawn, and daylight should find you well into the Ryesbeck."
"Are you not coming, captain?" some one asked.
"Not this journey. There's work to do here. If we don't keep up the game, they'll give us notice to quit."
The barge moved on, and Bina was just emerging from her hiding-place to confront the last speaker, when she was checked by a hand on her shoulder and a stern voice in her ear—the sergeant's!
"Bina! I couldn't have believed it," he said, angrily. "Out here at this time of night—alone—no, not alone either. Who's yon chap?"
"H—sh!" was the girl's answer in an anxious whisper. "There's no time to explain now. Hurry back—hurry by the front of the gaol to the police station. Pick up the night-duty men, and then make for the canal where it joins the Ryesbeck—not by the towing path, but by the bridge. You will head a barge coming there. Seize it, and you're a made man. Off with you!"
"And leave you here philandering with some one else! Oh, Bina!" protested her lover.
"Off, I say, or I'll never speak to you again. Every second is precious, I tell you," and she stamped her foot so imperiously that the sergeant, giving in, promptly disappeared.
Much valuable time had been lost in this short talk, but Bina, hastening forward, caught the man who was just closing the door under the cliff, and cried—
"Reuben! Reuben!"
The other would have retreated within, hoping thus to escape interference, but Bina cried again—
"Stop, Reuben, stop! It is no use: I know you. It is I, Bina, your sister. For your own sake, stop! I must speak to you."
The scapegrace brother—for he it was—paused, silent at first, then, with a volley of oaths, he asked—
"What are you jawing about? I want to have no truck with you; let me be."
"So it is you, Reuben, who have been trying to terrify us out of our lives, making use of the knowledge, which we picked up when we were children, of this door, and how it leads right under the walls into the heart of the prison; and turning it to your own wicked purposes too! Is there to be no end to the disgrace you bring on us, Reuben—the misery and the shame? Why did you ever return?"
"It is my home," answered the ne'er-do-well. I was born here in the gaol. Why should I not live in it?"
"You may die in a gaol yet," replied his sister, sadly.
"Father would not let me in at the front door," continued her brother, "so I made my own way in at the back. That's all about it."
"If it was all, Reuben! But you know that it's far worse. You are mixed up with a bad lot. They call you captain—I've heard them: these wretches—thieves and burglars—"
"How do you know they're that?" She felt her surmise was correct, her brother interrupted her so sharply.
"It is known to many more than me, Reuben. At this very moment the police are capturing your companions, barge and all. They will bring it back here directly; then you, too, will be taken. Don't think to escape. We shall none of us escape. Don't think but that father will also be held to blame, innocent as he is, as Heaven knows, and you will have ruined us utterly."
"Don't stand snivelling there," shouted Reuben, now feeling real and selfish alarm. "Tell me the truth. Are the coppers on to us really? No fooling! Is that so? Then I'm off!"
"Run, run, Reuben! Straight past the main entrance into the town," his sister said, urging him to instant flight.
"I must go back inside first. I have things there I cannot leave behind."
"You won't have time, Reuben. Hurry! hurry!"
"Can't I get out through the front gate? Is it closed? How did you come out? Ain't you going back to the lodge?"
"Of course. Well, I will meet you there. But, Reuben, for mercy's sake, lose no time."
He disappeared within the subterranean passage, and Bina made her way back to the gaol entrance. There they met again in less than ten minutes. Reuben, now well wrapped up and fortified for a long journey, hastily bade his sister "adieu," and she, having closed the gates behind him, returned to her own room.
* * * * *
Old Sharland never knew anything of what had occurred. No one had the least suspicion—the sergeant only excepted, and he was bound to strict secrecy—that Reuben was implicated, was, indeed, the ringleader of the gang of robbers who had made their secret headquarters in the gaol. It was more than a nine days' wonder in Ryechester. The capture of the barge and of several of the thieves led to confessions, followed by strict searchings and investigations, when it was discovered that the condemned cell and all adjoining chambers had served as a sort of robbers' cave. They were filled with stolen goods; they contained bedding, cooking utensils, the débris of food, all the indications of residence, which would have been more or less prolonged according as the rascals succeeded in giving the old gaol a bad name.
The Sharlands left the place soon afterwards. Sergeant Copthorne's conduct in securing the burglars was rewarded by his promotion and appointment to the charge of the city markets in another part of the town. When he married Bina, the old man went to live with them; and Reuben was last heard of in Galveston, Texas.