of good—­which might have justified me in inflicting on you a more lenient sentence than your offense had earned.  I had no other purpose in asking whether any thing was known of your previous career.  The reply to that question has astonished and shocked me, as it has shocked and astonished every right-thinking person in this court who heard it.  We knew to what base purpose you had used the comeliness and youth and good address with which nature had endowed you; and now we have learned how evilly you have misused your talents—­with what perverted ingenuity you have striven, at so early an age, to set at naught those precautions by which your country has lately endeavored to secure for itself efficient public servants.”

“That’s neat,” whispered a learned friend to Mr. Balais, reverently shutting his eyes, as though in rapt admiration.

“Very,” returned that gentleman.  “He’s bidding for the Lord Chief Justiceship.”

“In the whole course of my legal experience, young man,” continued the judge, “I have never seen a case which seems to me to call for more exemplary punishment than yours.  The promise of your future is dark indeed—­bad for yourself, and bad for that society which, though so fitted to adorn and benefit it, you have chosen to outrage.  I will not, however, reproach you further; I will rather express a hope that when you return to the world after your long probation—­and it will be as long as I am able to make it—­you may be a wiser and better, as well as a much older man.  The sentence of the court is, that you be kept in penal servitude for the space of twenty years.”

CHAPTER XXXII.

BROODING.

Not a syllable of the judge’s exhortation was lost upon the prisoner at the bar.  He listened to it as attentively as one who is waiting for the thunder listens to the muffled menace that precedes it, and the fall of each big drop of rain.  When the words of doom smote upon his ear a solemn hush succeeded them; and then one piteous, agonized shriek, and a dull fall in the gallery above.

“This way,” said a warder, sharply; and Richard was seized by the arm, and hurried through the trap-door, and down the stairs, by the way he had come.  It seemed to him like descending into hell itself.

Twenty years’ penal servitude!  It was almost an eternity of torment! worse than death! and yet not so.  He already beheld himself, at the end of his term of punishment, setting about the great work which alone was left him to do on earth—­the accomplishment of his revenge.  He had recognized his mother’s voice in that agonized wail, and knew that her iron will had given way; that the weight of this unexpected calamity had deprived even her elastic and vigorous mind of consciousness—­had crushed out of her, perhaps, even life itself.  Better so, thought he, in his bitterness, if it had; there would then be not a single human creature left to soften, by her attachment, his heart toward his fellows—­none to counsel moderation, mercy, prudence.