Page 453 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

As he flogged, he blushed; and when he flung down the cat
and stripped his own back for punishment, he felt a fierce
joy in the thought that his baseness would be atoned for in
his own blood. Even when, unnerved and faint from the
hideous ordeal, he flung himself upon his knees in the cell,
he regretted only the impotent ravings that the torture had
forced from him. He could have bitten out his tongue for his
blasphemous utterings— not because they were blasphe-
mous, but because their utterance, by revealing his agony,
gave their triumph to his tormentors. When North found
him, he was in the very depth of this abasement, and he
repulsed his comforter—not so much because he had seen
him flogged, as because he had heard him cry. The self-re-
liance and force of will which had hitherto sustained him
through his self-imposed trial had failed him—he felt—at
the moment when he needed it most; and the man who had
with unflinched front faced the gallows, the desert, and the
sea, confessed his debased humanity beneath the physical
torture of the lash. He had been flogged before, and had
wept in secret at his degradation, but he now for the first
time comprehended how terrible that degradation might be
made, for he realized how the agony of the wretched body
can force the soul to quit its last poor refuge of assumed in-
difference, and confess itself conquered.
Not many months before, one of the companions of the
chain, suffering under Burgess’s tender mercies, had killed
his mate when at work with him, and, carrying the body on
his back to the nearest gang, had surrendered himself—go-
ing to his death thanking God he had at last found a way of

For the Term of His Natural Life