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_ Throughout the trial he wore the sullen reserve which closed over
him like a visor when he approached one of the crises of life. He
had made his confession and he stood to it. "I killed Bill
Fletcher" he gave out flatly enough. What he could not give was
an explanation of his unaccountable presence at the Hall so
nearly upon midnight. When the question was first put to him he
sneered and shrugged his shoulders with the hereditary gesture of
the Blakes. "Why was he there? Well, why wasn't he there?" That
was all. And Carraway, who had stood by his side since the day of
the arrest, retired at last before an attitude which he
characterised as one of defiant arrogance.
It was this attitude, people said presently, rather than the
murder of Bill Fletcher, which brought him the sentence he heard
with so insolent an indifference.
"Five years wasn't much for killin' a man, maybe," Tom Spade
observed, "but it was a good deal, when you come to think of it,
for a Blake to pay jest for gettin' even with a Fletcher. Why, he
might have brained Bill Fletcher an' welcome," the storekeeper
added a little wistfully, "if only he hadn't put on such a nasty
manner afterward."
But it was behind this impregnable reserve that Christopher
retreated as into a walled fortress. There had been no sentiment
in his act, he told himself; he had not even felt the romantic
fervour of the sacrifice. A certain staunch justice was all he
saw in it, relieved doubtless by a share of his hereditary love
of desperate hopes--of the hot--headed clinging to that last
shifting foothold on which a man might still make his fight
against the power of circumstance. And so, with that strange
mixture of rustic crudeness and aristocratic arrogance, he turned
his face from his friends and went stubbornly through the
cross-questioning of the court.
>From first to last he had not wavered in his refusal to see
Maria, and there had been an angry vehemence in the resistance he
had made to her passionate entreaty for a meeting. When by the
early autumn he went from the little town gaol to serve his five
years in the State prison, his most vivid memory of her was as
she looked with the moonlight on her face in the open field. As
the months went on, this gradually grew remote and dim in his
remembrance, like a bright star over which the clouds thicken,
and his thoughts declined, almost without an upward inspiration,
upon the brutal level of his daily life. Mere physical disgust
was his first violent recoil from what had seemed a curious
deadness of his whole nature, and the awakening of the senses
preceded by many months the final resurrection of the more
spiritual emotions. The sources of health were still abundant in
him, he admitted, if the vile air, the fetid smells, the
closeness as of huddled animals, the filth, the obscenity, the
insufferable bestial humanity could arouse in him a bodily nausea
so nearly resembling disease. There were moments when he felt
capable of any crime from sheer frenzied loathing of his
surroundings--when for the sake of the clean space of the tobacco
fields and the pure water of the little spring he would have
murdered Bill Fletcher a dozen times. As for the old man's death
in itself, it had never caused him so much as a quiver of the
conscience. Bill Fletcher deserved to die, and the world was well
rid of him--that was all.
But his own misery! This was with him always, and there was no
escape from the moral wretchedness which seemed to follow so
closely upon crime. Fresh from the open country and the keen
winds that blow over level spaces, he seemed mentally and
physically to wither in the change of air--to shrink slowly to
the perishing root, like a plant that has been brought from a
rich meadow to the aridity of the close--packed city. And with
the growing of this strange form of homesickness he would be
driven, at times, into an almost delirious cruelty toward those
who were weaker than himself, for there were summer nights when
he would brutally knock smaller men from the single window of the
cell and cling, panting for breath, to the iron bars. As the year
went on, his grim silence, too, became for those around him as
the inevitable shadow of the prison, and he went about his daily
work in a churlish loneliness which caused even the convicts
among whom he lived to shrink back from his presence.
Then with the closing of the second winter his superb physical
strength snapped suddenly like a cord that has stood too tight a
strain, and for weeks he lingered between life and death in the
hospital, into which he was carried while yet unconscious. With
his returning health, when the abatement of the fever left him
strangely shaken and the unearthly pallor still clung to his face
and hands, he awoke for the first time to a knowledge that his
illness had altered for the period of his convalescence, at least
the vision through which he had grown to regard the world.
A change had come to him, in that mysterious borderland so near
the grave, and the bare places in his soul had burst suddenly
into fulfilment. Sitting one Sunday morning in the open court of
the prison, with his thin white hands hanging between his knees
and his head, cropped now of its thick, fair hair, raised to the
sunshine, it seemed to him that, like Tucker on the old bench, he
had learned at last how to be happy. The warm sun in his face,
the blue sky straight overhead, the spouting fountain from which
a sparrow drank, produced in him a recognition, wholly
passionless, of the abundant physical beauty of the earth--of a
beauty in the blue sky and in the clear sunshine falling upon the
prison court.
A month ago he had wondered almost hopefully if his was to be one
of those pathetic sunken graves, marked for so brief a time by
wooden headboards the graves of the men who had died within the
walls--and now there pulsed through him, sitting there alone, a
quiet satisfaction in the thought that he might still breathe the
air and look into men's faces and see the blue sky overhead. The
sky in itself! That was enough to fill one's memory to
overflowing, Tucker had said.
A tall, lean convict, newly released from the hospital, crossed
the court at a stumbling pace and stood for a moment at his side.
"I reckon you're hankerin', he remarked. "I was sent down here
from the mountains, an' I hanker terrible for the sight of the
old Humpback Knob."
"And I'd like to see a level sweep--hardly a hill, just a clean
stretch for the wind to blow over the tobacco."
"You're from the tobaccy belt, then, ain't you? What are you here
for?"
"Killing a man. And you?"
"Killin' two."
He limped off at his feeble step, and Christopher rubbed his
hands in the warm sunshine and wondered how it would feel to bask
on one of the old logs by the roadside.
That afternoon Jim Weatherby came to see him, bringing the news
that Lila's baby had come and that she had named it Christopher.
"It's the living image of you, she says," he added, smiling; "but
I confess I can't quite see it. The funny part is, you know, that
Cynthia is just as crazy about it as Lila is, and she looks ten
years younger since the little chap came."
"And Uncle Tucker?"
"His old wounds trouble him, but he sent you word he was waiting
to go till you came back again."
A blur swam before Christopher's eyes, and he saw in fancy the
old soldier waiting for him on the bench beside the damask
rose-bush.
"And the others--and Maria Wyndham?" he asked, swallowing the
lump in his throat.
Jim reached out and laid his hand on the broad stripes across the
other's shoulder.
"She was with Mr. Tucker when he said that," he replied; "they
are always together now; and she added; Tell him we shall wait
together till he comes."
The tears which had blinded Christopher's eyes fell down upon his
clasped hands.
"My God! Let me live to go back!" he cried out in his weakness.
>From this time the element of hope entered into his life, and
like its shadow there came the brooding fear that he should not
live to see the year of his release. With his declining health he
had been given lighter work in the prison factory, but the small
tasks seemed to him heavier than the large ones he remembered.
There was no disease, the physician in the hospital assured him;
it was only his unusual form of homesickness feeding upon his
weakened frame. Let him return once more to the outdoor life and
the fresh air of the tobacco fields and within six months his old
physical hardihood would revive.
It was noticeable at this time that the quiet tolerance which had
grown upon him in his convalescence drew to him the sympathy
which he had at first repulsed. The interest awakened in the
beginning by some rare force of attraction in his mere bodily
presence became now, when he had fallen away to what seemed the
shadow of himself, a friendly and almost affectionate curiosity
concerning his earlier history. With this there grew slowly a
rough companionship between him and the men among whom he lived,
and he found presently to his surprise that there was hardly one
of them but had some soft spot in his character--some particular
virtue which was still alive. The knowledge of good and evil
thrust upon him in these months was not without effect in
developing a certain largeness of outlook upon humanity--a kind
of generous philosophy which remained with him afterward in the
form of a peculiar mellowness of temperament.
The autumn of his third year was already closing when, being sent
for one morning from the office of the superintendent, he went in
to find Cynthia awaiting him with his pardon in her hand. "I've
come for you, Christopher," she said, weeping at sight of his
wasted figure. "The whole county has been working to get you out,
and you are free at last."
"Free at last?" he repeated mechanically, and was conscious of a
disappointment in the fact that he experienced no elation with
the words. What was this freedom, that had meant so much to him a
month ago?
"Somebody in Europe wrote back to Maria," she added, while her
dry sobs rattled in her bosom, "that the boy had confessed it to
a priest who made him write it home. Oh, Christopher!
Christopher! I can't understand!"
"No, you can't understand," returned Christopher, shaking his
head. They would not understand, he knew, none of them--neither
the world, nor Cynthia, nor his mother who was dead, nor Maria
who was living. They would not understand, and even to himself
the mystery was still unsolved. He had acted according to the law
of his own nature; this was all that was clear to him; and the
destiny of character had controlled him from the beginning. The
wheel had turned and he with it, and being as blind as fate
itself he could see nothing further.
Back once more in the familiar country, fresh from the strong
grasp of friendly hands, and driving at sunset along the red road
beneath half-bared honey-locusts, he was conscious, with a dull
throb of regret, that the placid contentment he felt creeping
over him failed in emotional resemblance to the happiness he had
associated with his return. Had the sap really gone dry within
him, and would he go on forever with this curious numbness at his
heart?
"Maria wanted you to go straight to the Hall," said Cynthia,
turning suddenly, "but I told her I'd better take you home and
put you to bed at once. It was she who went to the Governor and
got your pardon," she added after a moment, "but when I begged
her to come with me to take it to you she would not do it. She
would not see you until you were back in your own place, she
said."
He smiled faintly, and, leaning back among the rugs Cynthia had
brought, watched the white mist creeping over the ploughed
fields. The thought of Maria no longer stirred his pulses, and
when presently they reached the whitewashed cottage, and he sat
with Tucker before the wood fire in his mother's parlour, he
found himself gazing with a dull impersonal curiosity at the
portraits smiling so coldly down upon the hearth. The memory of
his mother left him as immovable as did the many trivial
associations which thronged through his brain at sight of the
room which had been hers. A little later, lying in her tester
bed, the fall of the acorns on the shingled roof above sent him
into a profound and untroubled sleep.
With the first sunlight he awoke, and, noiselessly slipping into
his clothes, went out for a daylight view of the country which
had dwelt for so long a happy vision in his thoughts. The dew was
thick on the grass, and, crossing to the old bench, he sat down
in the pale sunshine beside the damask rosebush, on which a
single flower blossomed out of season. Beyond the cedars in the
graveyard the sunrise flamed golden upon a violet background, and
across the field of lifeeverlasting there ran a sparkling path of
fire. The air was strong with autumn scents, and as he drank it
in with deep drafts it seemed to him that he began to breathe
anew the spirit of life. With a single bound of the heart the
sense of freedom came to him, and with it the happiness that he
had missed the evening before pulsed through his veins. Much yet
remained to him--the earth with its untold miracles, the sky with
its infinity of space, his own soul--and Maria!
With her name he sprang to his feet in the ardour of his
impatience, and it was then that, looking up, he saw her coming
to him across the sunbeams.
THE END.
The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia
Tobacco Fields by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow. _
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