Although in my uneasy slumbers I killed Gavin Hockley a hundred times at least—saw him lying at my feet, and realized clearly what I had done—I cannot say that such hauntings filled me with any horror in my waking moments. The thing had been done, and I had the savage certainty that it had been done well. Almost it seemed to me that I had gone before the woman I loved, and cleared the path for her—striking out of my way and hers the noxious thing that had menaced her. That was well done, and the path was clear; what else could matter?
It would be idle to suggest that I did not think about my fate. So many days in which to live, and with each morning one the less; so many times to look upon the faces of those who guarded me; so many meals to be got through; that was all. Then would come that last dreadful morning when they would wake me; when I would get, perhaps, a glimpse of the sunshine for which I longed, and would hear the passing bell; then—"to hang by the neck until you are dead."
In the time that was left me I travelled many, many miles. I seemed to see myself in a sort of perspective, narrowing down to the years that I could first remember, when I had been a child. I saw myself a happy boy at school; remembered the names of other happyboys, who would read of my fate, and shudder at what I had done; for I had been regarded as a gentle, amiable creature at school; I do not think I had ever even fought a boyish battle. They would talk about me—would say: "Why, I knew this chap at school!" and so would gain some temporary notoriety from the knowledge.
I remembered again a happy year or two in an old-fashioned German town; thought with tears of loyal brave friendships formed then—friendships that were never to be broken this side the grave. How we had mapped out then all we were to do—this man a writer, and this other a painter, and this stronger one a soldier! And then I fell to wondering in what obscure place within the prison they would bury me—for my bones to be found afterwards—long, long afterwards; when perhaps they might recall how young I was, and how brutal my crime.
I think they were all sorry for me; I know that they were gentler with me than with other prisoners. Once or twice the man who had prepared my defence came to see me; it seemed that they were preparing a great petition, to save me if possible from the gallows. I protested against that; it was not what I wanted. No living death for me, herded with criminals for the rest of my days; let me walk out as bravely as I could, and face the penalty. I protested strongly against the suggestion that I should be given any other fate than that I had earned. Nor would I in any way give them help for the framing of their petition; they had heard the evidence, and it was true—and what more did they want?
They plagued me to such an extent that at last I refused to see the man at all; but still I understood that the petition went on, and was being signed widely everywhere. I was so young—and, God help me!—sogood-looking, they told me—that there was every reason for the hysterical outpourings of sympathy; had I been old and hardened, never a word would have been said.
The good chaplain I listened to—hearing the simple comforting words that I had heard many and many a time in the old days at school. It seemed strange that I should hear them now, in this place, where I was shut away until the time came for them to kill me! My life had been clean and wholesome—there was nothing very heavy that I had to carry before my God, save that slaying of a fellow-man. And it seemed more than possible that God would understand.
The long days dragged themselves out, until there were but three left. I was in a mood to wish that they might hurry the business on; I had begun dreadfully to count the days, and then the hours; and there was a torture in that. I would have welcomed any man who came suddenly into my cell, and announced that then and there I must walk out to die; it was the knowledge that I must wait—must hear the clock in a distant church tower lopping off my life by inches, even in the still watches of the night; that was the terror of it. In mercy they might have stopped that clock—might have tried to cheat me a little as to the progress of the days; but that was all a part of my punishment.
And now I come to a strange thing that happened to me in that place of torture—a strange thing, sent for my comfort. You are to understand that two men watched me night and day, and their watches were relieved at regular intervals. I, who had so little to occupy my attention, came to watch for the changes, and for the new faces that greeted me when the time for changes came round. The men were good fellows,despite their occupation; I put it on record here that they were considerate and even courteous to me; I read a deep pity for me and my fate in the eyes of more than one of them.
It had come to that night when there were but three days left. I had eaten my meal, and had got into my bed; I liked that time best, because of the stillness, and because I liked to feel, poor doomed mortal that I was, that all the great city slept quietly about me, with every man and woman in it each with their separate trouble and their separate grief. I lay a thing apart, condemned to die; and there was in my mind the curious feeling then that it was strange that the needs of the world were such that a fellow-man had been able to say that I should die, and that other fellow-men were appointed to watch me that I did not escape, and that yet another fellow-man had the dreadful task of killing me, just as I had killed Gavin Hockley. Lying on my bed in my cell I thought of all that, and watched the men who were seated silently near me. And then I fell asleep, quite peacefully; and in that sleep I dreamed a dream.
The end wall of my cell was down, and it seemed as though I looked out beyond it over green fields, on to a place I knew. It was just as though one sat in some strange theatre, and saw through where the wall had gone to some scene beyond. At either side of the stage of that theatre, as it were, sat the motionless warders; the auditorium was my cell. And then I thought that I got up from my bed, and passed straight between them, and out to the freedom of the woods and the fields; leaving them motionless, and even looking behind for a moment, and seeing the empty bed there in which I had so recently lain.
I think I knew then, unconsciously, that I must go back to that cell, and that the vision would fade; Iam certain that I thought that. But for the moment I was free; I had passed into some strange country, and yet a country I knew. Then, just as in the fairy tales, I seemed to turn a corner, and found myself suddenly in the wood in which I had met Barbara. And it was the most natural thing in the world that she should come towards me out of the wood, smiling, as I had seen her smile before.
It was only when I reached her, and held her hands, and looked into her eyes, that I realized in my dream that she knew what had happened; there were tears in the dear eyes I loved.
"You are sorry for me?" I said, holding her hands. We seemed to be quite alone in the wood, and the sun was shining, just as it had shone on that day I met her first.
"I don't know what to say to you," she replied. "Of course I understand everything about it, and why you did it; I need not ask you about that. It was done for my sake—but oh, the pity of it!"
I remember telling her in my dream that I was quite happy and quite satisfied; I remember impressing upon her that I was not afraid. And then it seemed that we talked of other things, quite as though this death that menaced me had been brushed aside, and could not happen. And when the time came that we seemed to know with certainty that my freedom was done, she put her hands on my shoulders, and looked in my eyes, and spoke words that I remembered distinctly when I woke.
"I want you to understand that I am travelling night and day, and alone, to come to you, Charlie. I have been with my husband in a strange place abroad, where I have heard no news; the dreadful news of you only reached me an hour ago. I am stopping for nothing; my eyes see only one thing—the prison whereyou lie. I will reach you—God willing—before they kill you."
She kissed my lips; and with the kissing I woke, and looked about me. The warders still sat grim and motionless; one of them, as I stirred, turned and asked if I wanted anything. I thanked him, and said I wanted nothing; and I closed my eyes, and tried again to sleep. But sleep would not come to me, and I thought only of Barbara in the wood, and of what she had said—
"I will reach you—God willing—before they kill you!"
If she came now she must undo all that I had given my life to do; she must spoil my sacrifice. If she reached me before I died, I must begin the fight again, strenuously denying what I knew she would say. I began to tremble at the thought of that; almost I made up my mind that if she reached England in time I would not see her. And yet I repented of that; because I knew that if I refused to see her, she would tell her story to those most interested, and I should be powerless to stop her. I spent the rest of that long night lying awake there, staring at the ceiling of my cell, and wondering what I should do.
With the coming of the day I began to realize that I did not know how near she might be in that race with Death. At any moment she might be here, within my prison; and I might find myself face to face with her and her pleading. For I knew that if once I looked into her eyes, and held her hands, it was all up with me; I must speak the truth. More than that, in the dream I had had of her she had declared that she knew the truth already.
The night of that day came, and once again I found myself in my cell, gradually falling to sleep. And once again the end wall disappeared, and I passed outbetween the warders into the wood wherein I had met her. The vision was exactly the same as on the previous night; only now it seemed to me that she looked at me more anxiously, and that there was a strange wistfulness in her voice when she said the words: "I will reach you—God willing—before they kill you!"
Strangely enough, I had no thought of stopping her in my dream; I seemed only anxious to look into her eyes, and to hold her hands, and to snatch from that dear contact what comfort I could for the time yet left me on earth. Exactly as on the previous occasion the dream faded again; and I was in my cell, with the patient warders watching, and with the faint murmur of the waking city outside. And now I began to wonder if after all the dream had only been born of my own thoughts and desires—began to hope, even with a sense of disappointment, that perhaps after all she was far away with her young husband, and would only know of my fate long afterwards.
The next night the same thing happened; save that on this occasion I wandered the wood forlornly enough, and could not find her. I remember that I seemed to walk about the sunlit place, calling her name, and hearing nothing; that I thought more than once that I saw her disappearing in the distance, and ran on, crying to her, and finding no one. When I awoke, for the first time since my sentence I found my pillow wet with tears.
One more day and night of life. And now I began violently to long for her; to feel the bitter injustice of dying here in this place without seeing her. With one moment I would pray earnestly that she might not arrive in time; in the next would be faint with longing to hold her hands and hear her voice. It is safe to say that I never lost sight of that girlish figure; I thought of nothing else. The voice of the goodchaplain went by me like a thing unheard; if I listened at all, it was to hear him saying over and over again: "Barbara!"—"Barbara!"—"Barbara!"—over and over again as in a sort of chant.
It was growing late in the afternoon, and I was seated on the side of my bed, with my face buried in my hands, thinking. Even then I did not think of the near approach of death; I only longed insanely, now that my hour was coming, to live a little longer, that I might see her. I must have fallen into a sort of stupor; for I know it seemed to me the prison wall was down again, and that once again I had stepped out into the blessed sunlight of the free woods; when I felt a hand laid on my shoulder, and, looking up, saw one of the officials. He said something to me that I did not understand, and I got dazedly to my feet; looking past him, I saw Barbara, with her hands stretched out to me. And she was all in black.
At first I remember that I laughed, and looked stupidly from one to the other of the men about me. Then, at a sign from the man who had spoken, they fell back, and went to the further end of the cell. And I was quite suddenly in her arms.
The beautiful thing about it all was that she was so brave and so strong—braver and stronger than I was. I remember that she comforted me as she might have comforted a child—called me, again and again, her dear, dear boy; whispered again and again that they should not kill me. I was content just to hold her, and to listen to her voice; I thought of nothing else, save of the hopelessness of it all; for I felt that I was wiser than she was, and that I knew the thing to be inevitable. I don't know what power she had exercised, or in what strenuous fashion she had set to work to gain this last interview with me; I only remember with gratitude that they left us alone, and that we satside by side on the low bed, and talked in whispers. We were both so young that perhaps they relaxed the rules a little, and felt that it did not matter.
"I was far away—abroad—and I had no news," she began.
"Yes, I know," I replied. "And you travelled night and day since then to reach me."
"How did you know that?" she demanded quickly. And then I told her of the dreams I had had, and how I had met her in the wood, and how I had known from her own lips that she was coming to me.
She looked at me strangely, passing one hand over her forehead, as though by that mechanical action to clear her mind. "That is very wonderful, Charlie," she said, when I had told her the words she had used. "I said to myself, over and over again, while the slow trains crawled across the countries, and the slow ship ploughed across the sea—I said again and again those words to myself: 'I will reach you—God willing—before they kill you!' That is very wonderful."
"Nothing is wonderful with us," I replied, with a quick laugh that made the men turn and look at me curiously.
"When I heard what had happened, I scarcely knew at first what to do; and then I knew that I must come back—that I must see you, even if everything else proved hopeless. Lucas would have stopped me; he said it was no affair of mine, and that I must not—should not mix myself up in it. So I got away at night, and came straight to you; it was the least that I could do. Now you are to tell me everything that has happened—everything!"
"You will have heard already, Barbara dear, all that has happened—and why I killed him. It was a quarrel—a matter of money."
She looked at me with a world of understanding inher eyes. "That is what you have told every one; it is not what you can tell me," she said. "Think, dear"—she laid her hand on my arm, and her lips were quivering, although she spoke bravely enough—"you are to die to-morrow; by the love there is between us, you must not let me believe that you killed a man for such a thing as that. Unless you would kill my soul for ever."
"I can tell you nothing else," I replied as steadily as I could. "Perhaps I was not, after all, half so good as you in your love for me believed."
"You will at least not lie to me," she pleaded. "Tell me at least one thing: was there no talk about me between you?"
I did not answer, but my eyes must have done that for me; she went on, with a little quick note of triumph in her voice. "Ah—I begin to understand. He slandered me—said something of me that your love would not allow?"
"Barbara," I broke in hoarsely, "whatever has happened has been done by me of my own free will, and I must pay the penalty. As I hope to meet my God, and as I hope I may be understood then, I beg you will ask me nothing more. I pay with my life; don't take my victory from me."
"Then I was right," she exclaimed quickly. "I seemed to know it from the first. He met me in the wood that day, just as your guardian had done; he had met me before at my father's house. I was afraid of him, as I was afraid of no one else; I could read, as only a woman can read, what was stamped all over him. Oh—my dear—my dear"—she had sunk suddenly to her knees in that dreary place beside the bed on which I sat—"he was not worth it!"
"Let one thing be clear between us—and it is a dying man who speaks," I said, holding her face betweenmy hands, and looking down into her eyes—"you must be silent. No word of this must ever pass your lips, for your own sake—for the sake of every one. The time is coming when you will remember me only as some one who lived, far back in the years, and who loved and worshipped you; and you will keep what is our secret."
"I can't do that; it would shame me for ever," she whispered. "Imustspeak; Imustmake them understand."
"If you go out of this place, leaving with me a certainty that you will speak, you kill me doubly," I said earnestly. "Think what it means to me; nothing you can do or say now will save me; that is not in our hands. Let me die, believing that I helped you and saved you, and I die a happy man. Go out and spread your story, and tell the truth, and I die shamed in my own sight, leaving you shamed behind me. Because the lie I tried to kill will spring alive again, to be babbled by a hundred tongues."
"But if I do this—if I promise silence—is there nothing I can do—nothing I can say?" she whispered brokenly.
"There is nothing you can do," I replied solemnly. "Think of this: that in the years that are coming it may happen, in God's own good time, that some child you love may stand in need of a friend who will strike as I struck—fight as I fought—for her honour. It may happen, long after I am dead, and forgotten by all but you, that some such an one may spring up, to do again more perfectly what I did—springing from the dead ashes of my past to work out the pitiful story I began. Remember that—and don't stop me in what I try to do."
I did not know then the full meaning of what I said; all that was to come upon me later. I did not thenunderstand how strangely prophetic my words were, nor how strangely that prophecy was to be fulfilled. For the moment I had succeeded in my purpose; she promised me solemnly that she would keep silence.
Of our farewell I will not speak; she whispered to me words too sacred to be written here. Then, as it seemed, the prison wall went down, and she faded out into the world; the prison wall came up again, and shut me in. But it shut in a stronger and a better man.
I had no further vision of her; my prison had shut me in permanently, and I dreamed of her no more, save in my waking thoughts. I did not sleep that night; I remember that I lay there quietly, with my hands clasped under my head, looking up at the ceiling, and thinking about her; seeing her going on through the long years to come, living her quiet life, and carrying me always in her secret remembrance. That was good; that was very good. Many a man has died with a less blessed thought than that in his mind at the end.
But I was not to die in that sense, after all. Quite early in the morning—that morning on which I had set my mind steadily as the one that meant the end for me—the governor came to my cell, and announced to me that I was reprieved. I was totally unprepared for it; at first I could not understand what he meant. But he told me that on account of my youth the death sentence had been commuted to penal servitude for life.
On account of my youth! I laughed aloud when he said that, because the irony of the thing was so great and so bitter. I was to be shut away for the rest of my natural life—in a living death worse than any I had anticipated. I remember that I prayed him almost wildly to disregard the order—to set itaside—to declare that it had arrived too late; and I know that he seemed surprised that I, so young, should long so ardently for death.
So I passed out of the cell from which I had thought to pass only on one last journey, and went away to the place where I was to serve my sentence. And the only thing that troubled me—the only thing about which I thought at all in that new change of events—was what Barbara would think or do when she knew. For myself I did not care; I had died before, at that moment when the wall of the prison had seemed to go down, and Barbara had gone out of my life.
So many steps the length of my cell—beginning with the heel planted against the wall under the high window, and finishing at the door; so many steps across—beginning with the heel planted against the wall opposite the bed, and finishing at night at the bed itself, or in the day, when the bed had been turned up against the wall, at the opposite wall. Beside the door the heavy sheet of ground glass that made another window, outside which a light burned at night for a certain time; before that ground glass a wooden slab, fixed firmly in the wall, for a table; a stool for seat. And on the table my Bible. And that was my home for twenty years!
At first, when I realized what it meant: that I was to live there for all my life—that ambition, hope, and all that made life worthy had been stripped away from me—I rebelled fiercely. If I had had any chance to kill myself I should have done it; because this was so different from anything I had planned. I saw the years stretching on before me—seemed to see the very stones of the place worn by my feet, and I growing old in captivity, with all the busy eager world going on outside. Men and women living and loving, and laughing and weeping; little children being born; the seasons renewing themselves; and I at coarse toil,counting the days, and wondering when they would cease for me.
And yet in time, mercifully enough, I did not count the days. I knew when Sunday came round, because there was a difference; one sat in the chapel attached to the prison, and heard a man speak, and the sound of singing and of an organ; one looked about on the faces of other men, prisoners like oneself, and wondered about them. The same faces were seen in the exercise yard and in the shops during the week; but Sunday was a day to be looked forward to, as a break in the dread monotony of the week. I only counted Sundays after a time.
After a time, too, the fierce rebellion passed; I was getting used to things. One gets used to anything, they say, in this world; one's edges become blunted. In the course of years mine were blunted so much that I forgot almost how old I was—ceased to care, in fact. And I remember once that when they shifted me from one cell to another I was resentful, and pleaded to be put back again; I knew the stones of the other, and had grown to like them; and this was new to me. It was like turning a man out of his home, and I was bitter about it.
My fear at first had been that I might lose what refinement I had; I strove passionately to remember what I had been—to be always something better than those with whom I was herded. I believe I was a model prisoner; I read all that I could from the prison library, and I wrote when they would let me. After a time I began to write of that first part of my life—the free part; I was afraid that in the dull course of the years I might forget. Although at first the remembrance of what I had been and what I had done were strongly with me, in time it all narrowed down to the figure of Barbara, and rested there; nor would myrecollection turn to anything else. And during all those twenty years, wherein time did not stand still with me, she never changed; in my remembrance she was always the bright pretty girl of eighteen years of age whom I had loved so long before. It was as though she had died, and I had remembered what she was at the last. And it is safe to say that she was always with me.
Not that the wall of my prison ever went down, as it had done once when I lay condemned to death; that vision never came to me again. But in the night I dreamed of her—a mad impossible dream—that she waited somewhere near at hand—always young and beautiful, and always loving me—waited until such time as I should, by a miracle, get out into the world again. In the first years of my imprisonment I dreamed that, over and over again; but no other figure out of the past came to me—at least, not after my first remembrance of the world had worn off.
In time, as the years went on, it seemed as though, as I grew older, a sort of mental mist descended over all that life I had led before my trial—so that things were blurred, and I did not see them distinctly. Mercifully, too, I grew to take an interest in the work I did inside the prison walls; to be keen and anxious to do it well, and to do it better than my fellows. The prison life had worn and broken me, and I know that I was prematurely old, and a little feeble and fretful compared with what I should have been. And I was shocked one day when, in the tinsmith's shop, I got a brief vision of myself in a shining sheet of tin; I was old and haggard, and the little hair I had was quite grey. It frightened me; and I know that I lay awake that night, thinking bitterly of the years that had been stolen from me, and trying to remember how old I was.
Then the time came, quite unexpectedly, when Iwas set free. I cannot now write of that time, or think of it, without remembering how frightened I was, or how strange the sensation of freedom seemed to me. I had noticed that something was different—had feared that something was going to happen—because they had not cropped my hair for a little time, and would give me no explanation; and then at last one morning—one bitter winter morning, when I flogged myself with my arms to keep myself warm—I was sent for to the governor's room.
I had been there once or twice before, because the governor took an interest in me, and had tried to get me to talk. I would never do that, and I fear that he had thought that I was sullen or morose. He had asked me about my life before I had come to prison; had tried even to consult my wishes as to what work I should do; he had been uniformly kind and considerate. Now, as I went along to his room, I wondered petulantly what new thing this was that he wished to say to me. I did not like the room; it was a dreadful place to me, hung about with brightly polished steel chains and fetters, and with only a little table in the middle, at which he sat while any poor prisoner talked to him. I was left alone with him there, and he looked at me for a moment or two in silence. He had been a soldier, I think; he was a fine-looking old fellow, with a trim moustache and deep-set grey eyes.
"I have some news for you," he said in his abrupt fashion, "and I want you to prepare yourself for it. You are not strong, and I do not want to give you a shock of any sort."
I thanked him, and wondered dully what he meant.
"If you could have at the present moment anything for which you liked to ask, what would you choose?" he asked me.
I shook my head stupidly, and said that I did notknow; corrected myself in a moment, and asked, wistfully enough and almost with tears in my eyes, that I might have the making of some particular sort of pan in the tinsmith's shop; I had fancied it greatly, but they had given it to another man. He seemed touched by that, and laughed and shook his head; I had never heard him laugh before.
"An order has come to me from the Home Office in regard to you," he said. "Can you guess what it is?"—I shook my head; I did not understand that anything could happen to me.—"An order for your release."
I did not understand, and I suppose I stood staring at him as stupidly as before. For I had been condemned for life; what could this mean now? More than that, I had become settled in the place, and the idea that I should never leave it had sunk gradually into my mind, and had nailed me, as it were, to that spot, so that it would be difficult to tear me from it. I murmured that I did not understand.
"I have sent reports concerning you again and again to the Home Office," went on the governor; "I have been able to point out that you have been an exemplary prisoner; I have urged that fact upon them again and again. Do you know, Avaline, how long you've been here?"
I shook my head; I think I sighed a little. "I think I've forgotten, sir," I said. "So many winters—so many times when the sun shone, and I knew the summer had come again—but I have lost count of the years."
"You were here before my time," he said; and then added in what seemed to be a hushed voice: "You have been here for twenty years."
I said again that I had not kept count; I think I added a little wearily that it did not matter. His kindly voice went on—
"You were a boy when you came—twenty years of age. You must be forty now—still a young man. You have many years before you—years of freedom, in which you may live a new life." He spoke kindly and encouragingly, but the glance he gave me showed me that he knew I was an old and broken man, despite my years.
"It is too late for me to begin anything, sir," I said. "What life I had lies back behind the twenty years; I cannot take up any broken threads of it now. I did not expect ever to have to take up any free life again." I was moving towards the door, beyond which the warder awaited me, when I came back to him, on a sudden impulse that I would plead with him. "If I might stay here—and go on with what work I have learnt to do—I should be happier," I said. "If I wish to stay, you will not turn me out? God help me—this is my home."
He got up hurriedly from the table, and turned away for a moment, and cleared his throat. "It doesn't rest with me," he said abruptly at last; "I, like you, can only obey orders. Clothes will be provided for you, and a sum of money given you which you have earned; also you will get an order on the railway company which will take you to London. And I hope you'll do well."
I went to the door, turning back for a moment to thank him for what he had done, and to assure him again, something to his bewilderment, that I would have been glad to stop. For I was afraid of the great world outside, and I was too old and broken to begin again. I remember that I thought, bitterly enough, as I had thought before, that it would have been so much better if they had killed me at the first.
It was a wintry morning when I stepped out through the great gates of the prison—a free man. They hadall been very kind to me; most of the warders whom I knew well had shaken hands with me, and had given me little common keepsakes by which to remember them; I had been infinitely touched by the fact that one and all spoke to me as "Sir." I went with reluctant feet; strange as it may seem, I looked back more than once hungrily as I went out through the prison yard that I was to see no more, and through the great courtyard. A little wicket in the gate opened, and I shook hands with the man in charge there; and so left them all behind. Before me stretched a long road downwards towards a town in the far distance; I saw smoke rising lazily from its chimneys in the early morning air; all around me lay the great wastes of snow. And I alone, as it seemed, in the world—to begin again.
They had provided me with clothing that was new and rough, and awkward and ill-fitting; I felt like the naked impossible thing I was, that had been clothed and covered up in a hurry, so that men should not recognize me. I had a little money in my pockets, and a few odd things that had once belonged to me and had been carefully kept—things that had been mine twenty years before, and were mine again now.
I sat down on a heap of stones near the gates of the prison, with my mind full of the bitter injustice of the thing. If I had been in my cell now, I should have been eating my poor breakfast—comfortably! I should have known what the day held for me. And here I was—an outcast, and tired already before the day was begun.
The mere fact of wearing civilized clothing again, however coarse and common it might be, had brought back to my remembrance something of what I had been—some faint ghostly shadow of it. I found myself looking at my coarse hands, and at the broken stunted nails, and striving to remember what those hands hadbeen like ever so many years ago when I was a boy. Then, as a shadow fell across me, I realized that I had been sitting musing for some time; and looked up from the hands, to see a man standing in front of me.
He was a tall man, very thin, and not at all well dressed. He had a long thin nose with wide nostrils, and a short beard that was black at the roots and grey elsewhere. He stood with his hands clasped before him, and with the cold white fingers turning incessantly over each other. I wondered in a dull fashion where he had come from; but as he did not greatly interest me, I went on again looking at my hands. Then he spoke my name.
"Charles Avaline," he said, in a curious jerky voice that was only raised a little above a whisper.
I looked up at him, as I might have looked up any time during those twenty years at a warder, and spoke my number. It had been the natural thing to do with every one. "No. 145," I said, in a dull voice.
The man laughed in a disagreeable fashion as I dropped my eyes again from his face. "Poor broken devil!" he muttered to himself, and then spoke my name again. "Avaline—Charles Avaline. I don't want your number."
"They never wanted my name in there," I said, jerking my head towards the great gates of the prison. "It was always 145. But I'm Charles Avaline," I added.
He dropped his hand on my shoulder, and shook me—pulled me to my feet, in fact. "What are you sitting here for?" he demanded. "Don't you know you're free? Aren't you glad to be free?"
"What's the use?" I asked, with a shake of the head. "Don't you know I'm dead—dead to everybody? I've been in there"—I nodded at the prisonwith a queer sort of pride at the thought—"I've been in there twenty years."
"And might have been there another twenty, or another forty, or more than that, if you'd lived so long," he retorted. "They seem to have driven the brains out of you—what few you ever had. Look at me; have you ever seen me before?"
He struck himself on the breast, and leaned forward to stare at me. I trembled a little before him, but contrived to shake my head. "I don't remember," I said. But I knew that some old memory was springing up in me; I knew that I had seen some such face as this, perhaps in a dream, a long, long while ago. Life and memory were stirring so slowly in me yet that I could remember nothing. I only knew that I existed, and that I stood trembling in the snow before this man, and that I was cold and dimly afraid. I knew no more than that.
"Well, I've waited outside your grave for you until you came to life again," he said, with another laugh. "I'm your friend, if you know what that means, and I want to help you. Take off your hat; I want to look at you."
That old habit of obedience was so strong in me still that I pulled off my hat, and stood there, grey-headed, before him in the winter sunlight. Whoever he was he seemed shocked for a moment beyond measure; fell back from me a pace or two with a dropping jaw.
"God!" he muttered; and then in an awe-struck voice I heard him say again: "Poor broken devil!"
I put on my hat again, and waited patiently to hear what more he would say; I felt instinctively that in all the great world in which I stood so forlorn and lonely this man might chance to be my friend. And I wanted friends then badly.
"What are you going to do, Avaline?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I don't know," I said, with a glance down the long road that sloped away to the distant town where the smoke was rising in the still morning air. "I'm afraid to think."
"Got any money?" he demanded; and I turned out my pockets, and counted into his hands all I had. I told him a little proudly that it was what I had earned behind the great gates that frowned upon us as we talked.
"All this in twenty years!" He laughed, and transferred the few coins of which I had been so proud to his own pocket. "I'm your friend, Avaline," he said. "Come with me, and I'll look after you."
I want you to understand, if you can, something of what my feelings were at that time. I had gone into that place fiercely rebelling against my fate; I had gone into it young, with the fierce hot blood of life beating in my veins. Twenty years of it had tamed me and broken me; it had been a gradual process, but a sure one nevertheless. Slowly the rot of the prison had eaten into my soul; slowly and surely I had sunk to be what I was—a thing obedient to orders, and expecting always to have life measured out in scanty regular doses for my daily consumption. Now, in a moment, I had been flung upon the world; small wonder that I turned in fear and trembling to the first creature that called me by name, and spoke a decent word to me that was not a command. I had been tossed out into the world after twenty years; I was fumbling feebly to find my place in it—and this man might be able to tell me. So I went with him down the long hill into the town; and I felt even then that I went with the trot that had been mine in the exercise yard of the prison.
We came down into the pleasant little place; there were buxom women standing at the doors of the littlehouses, and whistling boys in the streets, and children trooping along on their way to school. By that time I had hold of my companion's arm, the better to keep up with his easier stride; I turned with him willingly enough into a little inn in a side street of the town, where, in a quiet room where we were alone, he ordered breakfast. When the smoking food was put before me I laughed, and clapped my hands like a child. He did not eat much himself; but he seemed greatly amused and interested at seeing me eat, and seemed, too, to understand what I felt.
"That puts life into you, doesn't it?" he asked, peering at me across the table. "That makes you young again, and ready to face the world—eh?"
I nodded gratefully, although I knew that it was my money that had paid for the meal. When I had eaten all I could, he leaned across the table towards me, and looked at me closely. I smiled at him in a friendly way, because I felt that he had been good to me.
"Charles Avaline—how old are you?"
I thought for a moment, and remembered what the governor had said to me before I left the prison. "I was a mere boy of twenty when I went in there," I said, "and I have lived there for twenty years."
"A simple sum in arithmetic," said my companion, with a grim laugh. "There's a looking-glass over the fireplace," he added, pointing to it; "look at it, and see what has happened to you in twenty years, my man of forty!"
I laughed as though this were some great game he was playing; I got up and went to the looking-glass. Staring into it I saw a worn lined face, with the eyes of a tired old man set in it, and crowned with grey hair. I had not seen myself in a mirror for all those years; I looked into the startled old face of a man of sixty at least. Realizing for the first time a little who I was,and what I was—and understanding perhaps the tragedy of what I had been—I turned away, sick at heart and afraid, and looked at him. He was still seated there, with his elbows on the table, and with that grim smile hovering about his lips.
"You're an old, old man," he sneered, "of no use to any one in the world, and of no use to yourself. Your life is a thing of the past, and you can't begin again now. What are you going to do—how will you live?"
I told him that I did not know; he seemed so much stronger than I was, and so much more accustomed to the big world in which I was expected to move, that I begged him to help me if he would, and to show me what I should do. I was so much a child, after that long burial to which I had been subjected, that I could not think for myself; indeed it never occurred to me to ask how this man came to know my name, or why he had met me at the prison gates.
"I mean to look after you," he assured me. "You shall live again, Charles Avaline; you shall take up your life where you thought once you had laid it down. You have been snatched from death; you shall come out into the world with me again; you shall come into your kingdom!"
I went with him placidly enough when presently we left the inn, and set off through the town. If you wonder that I should have submitted myself so readily to him, I ask you to remember the life I had lived, and the fear in which I stood of this great world that was closing about me. I was to have the past brought back to me fully and strongly, but I did not know that then; I was to live again, in another way, the life I once had lived, and to understand it in a new fashion.
We came to a railway station, and my companion took a ticket for London; he seemed to understandthat I had my pass from the prison—in fact, he asked me for it. The station master at the little place looked at me queerly, but I think he was used to poor prisoners who came to him with Government slips of paper to take them to various parts of the kingdom. He shut us into a third-class carriage alone together, and we started for London. And on the way, strangely enough, my companion raked over that long buried past of mine, and reminded me who I was, and what I was. I remember that I cowered before him, as I might have cowered before a judge who knew my record, and was passing sentence upon me.
"Charles Avaline, twenty years ago you killed a man," he began.
I nodded my head; I remembered that, at least. Had I not struck the man down many and many a time since, and seen him lying at my feet. But in the long dreary course of the years I had forgotten what it was for, or why it had been done; I only knew that he had deserved to die, and that I had done well to kill him.
"The gallows was built for you, Charles Avaline; the hangman stood ready for you; the grave yawned for you. But you were reserved for something else, Charlie; there was still some work for you to do in the world."
I leaned forward on my seat, and stared at him; for there was a dim feeling in my mind that I had met him somewhere, and that I knew him. The mention of my name in that form—"Charlie"—seemed to wake within me some old memory that had been dead. His knowledge of my crime, and of how I had gone down so near to death, set me wondering what manner of man this was that had seized me at the very prison gates, and now held me in his power by his knowledge of me.
"Who are you?" I demanded, staring at him fearfully. "What is your name?"
"You shall know soon enough," he replied, and relapsed into silence. I sat in a corner of the carriage, staring at him, and wondering about him; striving to fit him in with some dream I had had—a dream that had begun in some old time before the prison closed upon me. But the habit of thought had long been lost to me; my brain was a poor mechanical dull thing, long rusty for want of exercise. In fact, I do not think that I should have recognized him at all, if I had not noticed again that curious action of his thin white fingers, twining over each other restlessly. I had the courage to lean forward and pluck off his hat, and stare into his face. I think I must have shrieked out his name.
"Fanshawe! Jervis Fanshawe!"
"Yes, Jervis Fanshawe," he said. "Who else do you think would be likely to inquire about you, or to find out what day you were coming out? Who else do you think would watch and wait for twenty years to get hold of the man again who ought to have died twenty years ago. There's blood upon you, Charlie Avaline, and not all your years of servitude can wipe it away; but I think I'll stick to you." He folded his arms, and grinned and nodded at me, as though indeed he owned me body and soul.
And now the first frail door that held in check the floods of memory was down, and I began to read the past. Nothing was sure yet, nothing that I clearly understood; for at first, like a man who, getting old, thinks in a circle, and so sees his childhood first and most clearly, I saw my own boyhood, that had had nothing in common with this man. But gradually I began to fumble my way blindly to the point at which he touched my life. And gradually my old horror of him swept over me, and taught me instinctively that hewas something to be feared and to be avoided. Without knowing what I did, I sprang up, and made a leap for the opposite door of the carriage, with the blind determination to get out of the moving train. But before I had got the door open he had wound his long arms about me, and had pulled me back on to the seat.
"Not that way!" he cried, as I feebly struggled with him. "Death is not for you—yet. Don't you understand that you belong to me; when your time comes I'll settle what manner of death you'll die. What have you to be afraid of? We're in the same boat, you and I; the world has kicked us both pretty hard; we may do better together than we have done apart. Don't be ungrateful; your loving guardian has come back to you after twenty years; we'll see life together, Charlie."
I shrank away from him, and put up my arm as though to ward off a blow. "Where are you taking me?" I asked in a whisper.
"To London—and back into the world," he said, seizing my upraised arm, and dragging it down, and shaking me playfully. "There's work for you to do in the world, Charlie—great work."
"Where are you taking me?" I asked again, shuddering, and hiding my face in my hands.
"Before your hair was grey, poor fool, and while the world smiled upon you, you lived and loved and laughed. You shall live and love and laugh again; you shall forget your prison and the fear of death that has been upon you; you shall live again."
"Who can do all this for me?" I asked.
He tapped himself on the breast. "I can—and I will," he said. "There was a woman you loved in those old days—have you forgotten her name?"
"It was—it was 'Barbara!'" I whispered.
"Barbara!" he repeated, and I did not notice thesneer that was in his tones. "Barbara it was, and Barbara you shall see again. She shall rise up in the flesh before you, and show you what love is—and perhaps something else beside!"
London terrified me after the long silence of the prison; I was afraid of it. More than that, I discovered that I had forgotten my brief experience of it; so that I should have been unable, even had it been necessary, to find my way to the old rooms in the little street off Holborn, wherein I had dreamed my brief dreams, and wherein the Law had so suddenly gripped me, and swept me out of the world twenty years before. But I had this man for guide—this man who had been my guardian, and was now, as it seemed, my friend; I could only cling to him, with some measure of gratitude in my heart that he should have remembered me at all, and have come to my rescue when I was once more flung upon the world.
I gathered that he was poor; there were no signs about him of that prosperity that had once been his. Moreover, on reaching London he hurried me into an omnibus, and took me a long way rattling through an obscure part of the town to a street of mean houses abutting on the river; it was a place of houses evidently let out in rooms. He rang a bell at one house, and after a long time the sound of shuffling feet was heard, and the door opened a little way, and a face looked out. I was not sure at first whether it was the face of a child or of an old and wizened woman. Then, as the door was opened a little wider, I saw that it was a shabbyand forlorn-looking girl of about fifteen or sixteen, dressed in an old skirt and blouse much too big for her.
"All right, Moggs," said Fanshawe, "you needn't be afraid to let us in." He thrust her aside as he spoke, and motioned to me with a jerk of the head to follow him. I went in, and the girl closed the door.
"There's a letter for you upstairs, guv'nor," she said, calling after Fanshawe, who was mounting the stairs.
He muttered something, and went on his way; I followed obediently. We came into a forlorn-looking room, with an untidy bed in one corner, and with some wretched scraps of furniture scattered about it; a ragged apology for a carpet covered about half the floor. A cupboard, with a broken hinge to its door, swung open in one corner, and disclosed a few plates and cups and saucers, and some glasses that did not match. The place was destitute of fire, and was bitterly cold. Jervis Fanshawe strode out of the room again, and screamed querulously for the girl. "Moggs! Moggs!"
She came up in a moment or two; listened calmly to his volcanic outburst at her; and proceeded to light the fire. She was the strangest little person I ever remember to have seen; she went on calmly with her work, singing to herself under her breath a sort of melancholy dirge that had no tune nor time about it, but which seemed in some vague way to comfort her, much as a man may suck at an empty pipe, or a baby at a bottle. She took not the faintest notice of Fanshawe, despite all that he said; she only looked at me curiously once or twice before finally quitting the room. By that time my guardian (as I must continue to call him, for want of a better title) was deep in the letter he had found on the table. Finally he thrust it into his pocket, with an exclamation of annoyance, and turned to me.
I suppose the fact of seeing me standing there, huddled as close as I could to the fire, reminded him of something in the past; he looked round the room, and waved his hands, and spoke mockingly.
"Welcome, Charlie Avaline, to my rooms!" he exclaimed. "Perhaps I should say 'room,' because there's only one of 'em. Observe the furniture, the costly appointments, the ease and luxury of it all! To this have we come, Charlie—you and I. Who can say that we haven't done well for ourselves?"
He was on his knees before the fire, stirring it savagely and striving to make it burn, and muttering about it. He looked up at me with that old look of contempt on his face; flung the rusty poker into the grate with a clatter, and got to his feet. He was in a strange mood, and I did not know what to make of him. More than that, I was coming back so slowly to life myself that I did not trouble very much about him; I had just those animal instincts to warm myself, and to get food, and to rest, and nothing more. Whatever old pulses he had stirred in me with his mention of the woman I had loved were dropping back into their old condition. The time was coming when they were to be stirred and shaken, and brought to full and abundant life; but his was not the hand to sweep the strings of my being, and wake any music within me. I had only a dull curiosity concerning him, and that curiosity he presently began to satisfy.
"You're such a bloodless thing—something that has borne a number for years—a slave; one doesn't know how much you understand, or how much you don't," he began, looking at me over his shoulder in that old fashion I dimly remembered.
"I'll try to understand," I replied patiently.
"It is necessary that you should be told certain things; there's work for you to do, and you mustremember who you are, and what you have been, before you can undertake it. I've waited a long time for you, on the chance that you might come into my hands again; and I'm getting an old man, and time is precious. Carry your dull mind back, and see if you remember whatIwas."
I suppose I looked at him in a troubled way, as one not clearly understanding; he beat his fist upon the table, and cried out harshly at me.
"Numbskull! Do you remember what position I occupied?"
"You had money—you lived well—you had many friends," I began slowly; and he interrupted me impatiently.
"Yes, I had friends—money—power," he exclaimed. "The world went well with me, and there were those who trembled at the sound of my voice. Indirectly you brought me to this," he added, waving his hand to indicate the poor room. "When you killed Gavin Hockley, you let loose a cloud of things that had better have been hidden; I had forgotten the possibility of that when I set you on to kill him."
"I killed him because he spoke ill of a woman," I said, like one repeating a lesson.
"You killed him because I had made up my mind that you should," he retorted. "However, that's neither here nor there. Hockley had left behind a cloud of debts; he had paper signed by me; he had letters of mine. Even in those first days, when you were in prison, the thing sprang up alive to confront me; men whispered those ugly words, forgery and fraud. You've not been the only prisoner, my fine fellow."
"You?" I stared at him in amazement.
He laughed disagreeably. "Yes, they shut me away for seven years; and I came out what you see me now—aman ruined and broken, without a friend in the world, and without any one to speak a good word for me. Those I had known were dead, or would not speak to me; I was too old to make new friends of the sort I had known before. So I've lived by my wits, Charles Avaline, just as you'll have to live. While you've been warm and well-cared for at the expense of your country, I've been down into the depths, and have seen strange things. And it's not a nice world for a man under those circumstances. One longs to get hold of another man, and to drag that other man down, and show him that bitter life too," he added savagely.
"I—I'm sorry," I said vaguely; I did not know what else to say. "You see, I have not known what has been happening. In all the long time (they tell me it was twenty years)—in all the long time that I have been there I have not seen the face of any one I ever knew before; and I have not heard a voice that was a voice out of the past, save in dreams. And I never had a letter."
"No—they forget you easily when you go under," said Fanshawe. "As for me, I thought they'd hang you; and by the time they hadn't done that I was too full of my own troubles. I suppose you'd like to know something about the old people and the old days—eh?" He thrust his face towards me across the table; his eyes were hungry. I did not understand then what was in the mind of the man; his brain was clear and strong, and his plans already well thought out. My brain was dull and tired, and I had no plans at all.
"You remember Hammerstone Market?" he went on, watching me, and perhaps noting the expression of my face as I heard names I remembered. "All changed down there, in one way, and yet not changed in another. Some dead, and some alive. You remember Barbara?"
"Yes; I loved—loved Barbara," I whispered brokenly.
"You shall see her again; talk with her again; come into her life again." There was a fierce eagerness about him that held me and frightened me. "That's what I'm going to do for you; that's what I meant when I said that I would bring you back to love and life and laughter. Look round this room—and then see it all swept away," he went on with growing excitement. "I've found one friend who will help us both; it may happen that we are not poor and forlorn any more. We have both suffered; it is right that we should have some little joy in our lives."
"What are you going to do with me?" I asked him, as I had asked before; but he laughed, and would not answer me.
I spent the rest of the day in that place, cowering over the fire, and striving hard to look back into the past. I found it difficult at first; it was like a closed book to me, in which only here and there, when I was able at last to open it, could I decipher a few words—a few broken sentences that came like the sigh of a dead wind blowing over the dead years back to me. I got up mechanically when I was called to eat what simple food he put before me, going back afterwards to crouch over the fire, and to start that burrowing process again into the lost years.
It was late in the evening when I saw him reading again that letter he had taken from his pocket, and muttering to himself over it. At last he seemed suddenly to make up his mind about it; he crammed it back into his pocket, and put on his hat, and announced that he was going out. "You can stay here," he told me curtly; "no one will interfere with you."
I sat still for a little time after he had gone; and then an intolerable restlessness seized upon me. I waslike a lost spirit; I did not know what to do with myself. I found myself pacing out again on the floor the steps that for twenty years I had paced out in my cell; and finding the room too large, so that the steps would not fit in. And at last got my hat, and went out into the streets; and looked about me, with a new and definite idea for the first time growing in my mind.
Hammerstone Market! At Hammerstone Market I had been happy once; and there, waiting for me, and preserved in some strange fashion through all the years, was the life I had laid down and left behind me. Why had I not thought of this before? It was the simplest thing in the world; I had but to go to that place where I had been happy to pick up again the thread of my life, and to put together successfully the puzzle I did not now understand. So I set out for the place, with a new and happy confidence growing in my mind.
I was but groping yet, and I did not understand fully what I meant to do. I was but a poor thing, striving hard to get back to some life I had lost; and so it happened that I set about it as a child might have done, and in what seemed to my childish mind the simplest and most direct way.
I have wondered since what I must have looked like to any one who saw me then, wandering about in search of Hammerstone Market. I have a vision of myself as being tall and thin, and gaunt and old-looking; with deep eyes that must have been pathetic in the hopeless weariness that was in their depths. My years counted as nothing; I was a shabby tired old man, going back, pathetically enough, to pick up here and there a thread of the life that had been snatched so suddenly from me. I knew of no way to reach the place of my dreams, except to walk; and I only knew dimly that it lay in a county not very far to the north of London.
By little short of a miracle I found the place, after walking through the best part of a long winter night. When once I had got out of London the road had proved to be a straight one; I walked on and on with dogged persistency. By the time the morning light was beginning to break over the country that stretched before me, I was within reasonable distance of the place, and my heart was light with a hope it had not known for years. For I was coming back to the place where for a little time at least I had lived and loved and suffered—and I was to see Barbara!
Even then I had no thought that she could be anything but the bright girl I had left. Time had stood still with me, and my life had been so completely a thing of dreams that she was a dream creature in my mind still; I could think of her in no other way. I came back to the place where I had known her after that lapse of twenty years, but under what different conditions! I had come there before a mere boy, with the world at my feet; I crept back now, jaded and weary and old, to look on the life I had known, and to find my lost love, who, had I but thought about the matter clearly and sanely, I must surely have understood might well be in her grave years before.
The place was unchanged; the mere sight of the old houses and of the quaint High Street stirred my memory, and made me see more clearly into that past in which I was groping. I went on eagerly; I wanted to find again all that I had lost so long ago.
Perhaps it was characteristic of my wasted life that it should be winter now, instead of the summer when I had first met Barbara in the woods; it was as though the joy and beauty of it all had been stripped away. But when I came to the wood at last, with the bare branches of the trees standing up nakedly against the sky, a gleam of sun struck across it, making fancifulpatterns on the snow. I sat down on a fallen tree, and looked about me, with my mind clearing more and more every minute.
Have you ever closed your eyes, and seen suddenly and vividly in a mental picture some scene that was enacted years and years before—seen the figures moving in it, just as they did long ago? That was what I saw then, or began to see, when, suddenly raising my eyes, I saw standing in the sunlight an easel with a canvas upon it. I knew then that in some extraordinary fashion I had dropped back through the years, and had come again as a young man into the wood. Yet not as a young man; because now I was poor and old, and shabby and tired—and it was winter. There could be no getting away from that; in spite of the sunlight it was winter.
I walked up to the canvas, and touched it, to be sure that it was real. And then, knowing my way clearly, as it seemed, I walked on into the depths of the wood, looking about me.
God of mercy!—she was there! I saw her coming straight through the wood—Barbara, with her hands outstretched, and a smile on her face; I knew her in a moment. And going towards her, as it seemed, was myself—a tall straight youth, with an easy step and an eager manner, meeting her and holding her hands, and looking into her eyes. I had slipped behind a tree, so that they did not see me; I stood there with my hands pressed against my throbbing temples, looking on at what seemed to be a dream picture of something that had happened years and years before—looking on at myself, and seeming to live again my own hopeless love story. For now I saw that the boy held her close in his arms, and whispered to her; and she seemed to be weeping.
My first thought was that I must have suddenly gonemad, or that this was some dream out of which I should presently wake. But while I stood there staring at them, I went over in my mind all that I had done the previous night and that day: my long walk from London—and the coming into the old town at break of day—then this further journey here. I looked down at my shabby clothes, and stared in bewilderment at my coarsened hands with the broken nails. Yes—I was convict No. 145—once Charlie Avaline; and these were no dream figures, but two people living out again, in some strange fashion, the life that I had lived in a few short hours with Barbara Patton. Yet here was Barbara herself—with the eyes of my Barbara, and the face of my Barbara—all unchanged, as I had dreamed of her so often in my cell in prison! How was I to account for that?
I remained hidden at no great distance from them; I saw them presently part. The boy was impressing something upon her; I saw her dry her tears, and listen, and even strive to smile at something that he said. Then they clung together for a moment or two—and she ran away through the woods, waving her hand to him as she went. He walked back dejectedly to his easel, and packed up his things, and went away. And I, in a fever of anxiety and remorse and wonder, followed him.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all was to see him go to that inn where I had once stayed—going into it with the light step that I must have had twenty years before. It was as though the ghost of myself had come back, in a better shape than I, to take up the life I had dropped.
I watched him all that day; which is to say that I hung about the little town, and waited for him, wondering what he would do. I was not surprised when, as it was growing dark, he came out into the High Street, and set off at a swinging pace in the direction of thehouse I had known as belonging to old Patton. With the trot that had been mine for so long in the exercise ground of the prison, I went after him.
It was obvious that he was not so lucky as I had been, in that he must not enter the house. I crept into the grounds, and presently saw him standing on that very terrace on which I had stood with my Barbara—looking in at the windows and listening; I was below the terrace, crouched among some bushes, watching him, and watching the lighted windows. Presently a man walked to one of them, and opened it a little way, and returned into the room; and still I lay there, watching and thinking and wondering.
Then across the silence of the night there broke the sound of music, and the voice of a girl singing. I dropped my head upon my arms as I lay there; it seemed as though I could not bear it. For this was a song I had heard twenty years before in that very room, and it seemed to me that the voice was the same, coming hauntingly and wonderfully out of the past. The boy stood listening too; every word and every note floated to us clearly. It seemed as though out of the deep night of the years Barbara's voice came to me, singing to me as she had sung before.
The song ceased, and the last notes died away. The girl came to the open window, and looked out into the night; I saw the boy crouching there, watching her. Then from somewhere in the room a man's voice sounded quite clearly and distinctly.
"Barbara, you have your mother's voice."
She turned her head, and looked back into the room. "Thank you, father," she said; "I like to hear you say that."
I lay still, with a full understanding coming to me for the first time. This was not my Barbara; this was her child. I had come back, to find the mothergone, and the child in her place—in her very likeness. And I had come back, as it seemed, to touch again a love story as hopeless and as broken as my own had been. While the girl stood at the window, and the boy crouched in the shadows watching her, I lay there—thinking—thinking!
Presently the window was fastened, and the shutters drawn; lights began to appear in the upper windows. The boy lingered for a long time, but presently stole away; I crept after him. I did not know what to do, or what to think; I was like a lost soul wandering the earth, forlorn and hopeless and helpless. But he, going on through the night back to his lodging, was so much a part of myself, sprung up suddenly out of the past, that I could not bear to lose sight of him; I was close behind him when we came to the outskirts of the little town. There he turned suddenly, and faced about, looking at me.
"Why do you follow me?" he asked suspiciously.
"I meant no harm," I replied. "I beg you won't take any notice of me; I'm only a poor wanderer."
I saw his hand go to his pocket, as though he would have given me money; I drew back hastily. "Not that," I said; "I don't need that. But I was once like you—God knows how many years ago!—and so I liked to feel that I was near you. I'm sorry ... good-night!"
I went away quickly, leaving him staring after me. Presently, when he had gone on again, I followed him, at a greater distance; came to the inn where he was stopping, and stood outside for a long time, wondering passionately and despairingly if I could help him; and then laughing at that thought, ruefully enough, when I remembered my own forlorn condition.
The hopelessness of doing anything there, where I was merely a penniless waif, was borne in upon me moreforcefully the next day. I had found shelter in a barn, and I begged my breakfast from a charitable woman at a cottage. Then I set out again to walk to London. It was only when I was many miles on my journey that I stood still in the road, with a hand pressed to my forehead, and with a new light breaking in upon me.