alacrity,
sullenness; for prompt obedience, impertinent intrusion. The men whom
North favoured were selected as special subjects for harshness, and for
a prisoner to be seen talking to the clergyman was sufficient to ensure
for him a series of tyrannies. The result of this was that North saw the
souls he laboured to save slipping back into the gulf; beheld the men he
had half won to love him meet him with averted faces; discovered that
to show interest in a prisoner was to injure him, not to serve him. The
unhappy man grew thinner and paler under this ingenious torment. He had
deprived himself of that love which, guilty though it might be, was,
nevertheless, the only true love he had known; and he found that, having
won this victory, he had gained the hatred of all living creatures with
whom he came in contact. The authority of the Commandant was so supreme
that men lived but by the breath of his nostrils. To offend him was to
perish and the man whom the Commandant hated must be hated also by all
those who wished to exist in peace. There was but one being who was not
to be turned from his allegiance--the convict murderer, Rufus Dawes, who
awaited death. For many days he had remained mute, broken down beneath
his weight of sorrow or of sullenness; but North, bereft of other love
and sympathy, strove with that fighting soul, if haply he might win
it back to peace. It seemed to the fancy of the priest--a fancy
distempered, perhaps, by excess, or superhumanly exalted by mental
agony--that this convict, over whom he had wept, was given to him as a
hostage for his own salvation. "I must save him or perish," he said. "I
must save him, though I redeem him with my own blood."

Frere, unable to comprehend the reason of the calmness with which the
doomed felon met his taunts and torments, thought that he was shamming
piety to gain some indulgence of meat and drink, and redoubled his
severity. He ordered Dawes to be taken out to work just before the hour
at which the chaplain was accustomed to visit him. He pretended that
the man was "dangerous", and directed a gaoler to be present at all
interviews, "lest the chaplain might be murdered". He issued an order
that all civil officers should obey the challenges of convicts acting as
watchmen; and North, coming to pray with his penitent, would be stopped
ten times by grinning felons, who, putting their faces within a foot
of his, would roar out, "Who goes there?" and burst out laughing a