|I DON'T think he'll be sech a fool as to p'int fer home the fust
thing he does.” The speaker, a young man with a dull, coarse face and
slouching air, knocked the ashes from a half-smoked cigar with his
little finger, which was heavily ornamented with a large seal ring, and
adjusted himself to a more comfortable position.
“I dun'no which p'int o' the compass he'd more naterally turn to,”
observed another; an elderly man with a stoop in his shoulders, and a
sharp, thin face that with all its petty shrewdness was not without its
compensating feature--a large and kindly mouth. The third man in the
little group was slowly walking back and forth on the platform that ran
across the station, rolling and unrolling a small red flag which he held
in his hands. He turned with a contemptuous “umph” to the young man,
remarking as he did so, “'Tain't mostly fools as goes to prison. Joe
Atherton prob'ly has as many friends in this section o' the kentry as
some who hain't been away so much.”
“Joe was a good little boy,” pursued the old station-master; “he wuz
allers kind to his mother. I never heard a word ag'in him till that city
swell came down here fer the summer and raised blazes with the boy.”
“If there ain't the Squire!” exclaimed a hitherto silent member; “he's
the last man as I should jedge would come to the deepo to welcome Joe
Atherton.”
A stout, florid, pompous individual slowdy mounted the platform steps,
wiping his forehead with a flaming red silk handkerchief, which he
had taken from his well-worn straw hat. “Warm afternoon, friends,” he
suggested, with an air of having vastly contributed to the information
of the men, whose only apparent concern in life was an anxiety to find a
shady corner within conversational distance of each other.
The Squire seated himself in the only chair of which the forlorn station
boasted; he leaned back until his head was conveniently supported, and
furtively glanced at a large old-fashioned watch which he drew from his
vest pocket.
“Train's late this a'ternoon, Squar',” said the man with the red flag. “I
reckon ye'll all hev to go home without seein' the show; 'tain't no ways
sartin Joe'll come to-day. Parson Mayhew sed his time was up the fust
week in September, but there's no tellin' the day as I knows on.”
A sustained, heavy rumble sounded in the distance. Each man straightened
himself and turned his head to catch the first glimpse of the
approaching engine, With a shriek and only a just perceptible lessening
of its speed, the mighty train rushed by them without stopping, and was
out of sight before the eager watchers regained the power of speech.
Five minutes later the red flag was in its place behind the door, its
keeper turned the key and hastened to overtake his neighbor, who had
reached the highway. Hearing the hurrying footsteps behind him, the man
turned, saying triumphantly, “I'm right-down, glad he didn't come.”
“So be I; there's an express late this evenin' that might bring him
down. I shall be here if Louisy's so as I kin leave her.”
“Wa'al,” returned the other, “I shan't be over ag'in to-night, but you
jest tell Joe, fer me, to come right ta my house; he's welcome. Whatever
he done as a boy, he's atoned fer in twenty years. I remember jest how
white and sot his face was the day they took him away; he was only a boy
then, he's a man now, gray-headed most likely; the Athertons turned gray
early, and sorrow and sin are terrible helps to white hair.”
The old man's voice faltered a little; he drew the back of his hard,
brown hand across his eyes. Something that neither of the men could
have defined prompted them to shake hands at the “Corners”; they did so
silently, and without looking up.
Joe came that night. The moon and the stars were the silent and only
witnesses of the convict's return. It was just as Joe had hoped it might
be; yet there was in the man's soul an awful sense of his loneliness and
isolation The eager, wistful light faded out of his large blue eyes, the
lines about his firm, tightly-drawn mouth deepened, the whole man took
on an air of sullen defiance. Nobody cared for him, why should he care?
He wondered if “Uncle Aaron,” as the boys used to call him, still kept
the old station and signaled the trains. Alas! it was one of “Louisy's”
bad nights; her husband could not leave her, and so Joe missed forever
the cordial hand old Aaron would have offered him, and the kind message
he was to give him, for his neighbor.
Sadly, wearily, Joe turned and walked toward the road, lying white
and still in the moonlight. His head dropped lower and lower upon his
breast; without lifting it he put out his hand, at length, and raised
the latch of a dilapidated gate that opened into a deep, weed-entangled
yard. His heart was throbbing wildly, a fierce, hot pain shot through
his eyes. Could he ever look up? He knew the light of the home he was
seeking had gone out in darkness years before. The only love in the
world that would have met him without question or reproach was silent
forever; but here was her home--his home once--the little white house
with its green blinds and shady porch.
He must look up or his heart would burst. With a cry that rang loud and
clear on the quiet night, he fell upon his face, his fingers clutching
and tearing the long, coarse grass. There was no house--no home--only
a mass of blackened timbers, a pile of ashes, the angle of a tumbling
wall. Hardly knowing what he did, Joe crept into the shelter of the old
stone wall. With his face buried in his hands he lived over again, in
one short half-hour, the life he hoped he had put away when the prison
doors closed behind him. All through the day there had struggled in his
heart a faint, unreasoning faith that life might yet hold something fair
for him; one ray of comfort, one word of kindness, and faith would have
become a reality. As the man, at last lifted his pale, agonized face to
the glittering sky above him he uttered no word of prayer or entreaty,
but with the studied self-control that years of repression had taught
him, he rose from the ground and walked slowly out of the yard and
down the cheerless road again to the station. Life hereafter could mean
nothing to him but a silent moving-on. Whenever or wherever he
became known, men would shrink and turn away from him. There was no
abiding-place, no home, no love for him in all God's mighty world. He
accepted the facts; there was only one relief--somewhere, some time, a
narrow bed would open for him and the green sod would shelter the man
and his sin till eternity.
He hastily plucked a bit of golden-rod that nodded by the roadside; then
taking a small, ragged book from a pocket just over his heart, he opened
it and put the yellow spray between the leaves. As he did so a bit of
paper fluttered to the ground. Joe stooped and picked it up. It was a
letter he had promised to deliver from a fellow-prisoner to his mother
in a distant town.
Not very far away an engine whistled at a crossing. A slowly moving
freight and accommodation train pulled up at the depot a few moments
later. Joe entered the dark, ill-smelling car at the rear and turned his
face once more to the world.
It was in the early twilight of the next evening that Joe found himself
in the hurry and confusion of a large manufacturing town. As he passed
from the great depot into the brilliantly lighted street, he was
bewildered for a moment and stood irresolute, with his hand shading his
eyes. At one corner of the park that lay between the station and the
next street, a man with a Punch-and-Judy theatre had drawn around him a
crowd of men, women, and children. Joe mechanically directed his steps
that way, and unconsciously became a part of the swaying, laughing
audience.
“Hold me up once more, do Mariar, I can't see nothin',” begged a piping,
childish voice at Joe's knee.
“I can't, Cynthy; my arms is most broke now holdin' of ye; ef you
don't stop teasin' I'll never take ye nowheres again,” replied a tall,
handsome girl, to whom the child was clinging.
Joe bent without a word, and picking up the small, ill-shaped morsel of
human longing and curiosity, swung her upon his broad shoulder, where
she sat watching the tiny puppets and listening to their shrill cries,
oblivious of all else in the world. Once she looked down into the man's
face with her great, dark, fiery eyes and said softly, “Oh, how good you
are!” A shiver ran through Joe's frame; these were the first words that
had been addressed to him since he said good-bye to the warden in that
dreary corridor, which for this one moment had been forgotten. The
little girl, without turning her eyes from the dancing figures before
her, put one arm about Joe's neck and nestled a little closer to him.
Joe could have stood forever. The tall, dark girl, however, had missed
Cynthy's tiresome pulling at her skirts and the whining voice. She
looked anxiously about and called “Cynthy! Cynthy! where are you? I'll
be thankful if ever I gets you back to your grandmother.” The fretful
words aroused Joe from his happy reverie; he hurriedly placed the child
on the pavement, and in an instant was lost in the crowd.
He set out upon his quest the following morning and had no difficulty in
finding the old woman he was seeking. At one of a dozen doors marking as
many divisions of a long, low tenement building near the river, he had
knocked, and the door had opened into a small, clean kitchen, where a
bright fire burned in a tiny stove, and a row of scarlet geraniums
in pots ornamented the front window. The woman who admitted him he
recognized at once as the mother of the man in that far-away prison,
whose last hold-upon love and goodness was the remembrance of the aged,
wrinkled face so wonderfully like his own. In a corner behind the door
there stood an old-fashioned trundle-bed. As Joe stepped into the room a
child, perhaps ten years old, started up from it, exclaiming “That's the
man, Granny; the man who put me on his shoulder, when Mariar was cross.
Come in! come in, man,” she urged.
“Be still, Cynthy,” retorted the grandmother, not unkindly, as she
placed a chair for Joe, who was walking over to the little bed from
which the child was evidently not able to rise alone. Two frail hands
were outstretched to him, two great black eyes were raised to his full
of unspoken gratitude. Joe took the soiled letter from its hiding-place
and gave it to the woman without a word. She glanced at the scarcely
legible characters, and went into an adjoining room, her impassive face
working convulsively.
“What's the matter with Granny, was she crying? I never seen her cry
before,” said Cynthy. “Granny's had heaps o' trouble. I'm all thet's
left of ten children and a half-dozen grandchildren. She says I'm the
poorest of the lot, too, with the big bone thet's grow'd out on my back;
it aches orful nights, and makes my feet so tired and shaky mornin's.
Granny's kind o' queer; some days she just sets and looks into the fire
fer hours without speakin', and it's so still I kin a'most hear my heart
beat; and I think, and think, and never speak, neither, till Granny
comes back and leans over me and kisses me; then it's all right ag'in,
an' Granny makes a cup o' tea an' a bite o' toast and the sun comes in
the winder, and I forget 'bout the pain, an' go out with Mariar, when
she'll take me, like I did last night.”
The child's white, pinched features flushed feverishly, her solemn,
dusky eyes burned like coals. She had been resting her chin in her
hands, and gazing up into Joe's face with a fascinated intensity.
She fell back wearily upon the pillows as the door opened, and her
grandmother returned and put her hand on Joe's shoulder, saying
brokenly, “You've been very kind.” The little clock on the shelf over
the kitchen table ticked merrily, and the tea-kettle hummed, as if it
would drown the ticking, while Joe and Cynthy's grandmother discussed
and planned for the future.
It was finally settled that Joe should look for work in Danvers, and if
he found it, his home should be with the old woman and Cynthy. He did
not try to express the joy that surged over and through his heart, that
rushed up into his brain, until his head was one mad whirl; but with a
firm, quick step and a brave, calm look on his strong face, he went out
to take his place in the busy, struggling world--a man among men.
Two months passed; months of toil, of anxiety, sometimes of fear;
but Joe was so gladdened and comforted by Cynthy's childish love and
confidence, that, little by little, he came out of the shadow that had
threatened to blacken his life, into the sunshine and peace of a homely,
self-sacrificing existence in “Riverside Row.”
Cynthy's ideas of heaven were very vague, and not always satisfactory,
even to herself, but she often wondered, since Joe came, if heaven
ever began here and she was not tasting some of its minor delights. Of
course, she did not put it in just this way; but Cynthy's heaven was a
place where children walked and were never tired, where above all things
they wore pretty clothes and had everything that was denied them on
earth. Joe had realized so many of the child's wild dreams, had made
possible so many longed-for or unattainable pleasures, had so brightened
and changed her weary, painful life, that to Cynthy's eyes there was
always about his head a halo as in the pictures of Granny's saints;
goodness, kindness, generosity--love, were for her spelled with three
letters, and read--Joe. Out of the hard-earned wages the man put into
Granny's hand every Saturday night, there was always a little
reserved for Cynthy. Her grandmother sometimes fretted or occasionally
remonstrated; but Joe was firm. Alas! human life, like the never-resting
earth, of which it is a part, swings out of the sunlight into the
shadow, out of the daytime into the darkness through which the moon and
the stars do not always shine.
One night, a bitter, stormy night in November, he was a little late in
leaving his work. He had to pass, on his way out of the building, a knot
of men who were talking in suppressed voices. They did not ask him
to join them, but the words “prison-scab,” “jail-bird”, fell on his
ever-alert ear. With a shudder he hurried on.
Granny was stooping over the trundle-bed in a vain attempt to quiet the
child, who was tossing upon it, in pain and delirium. Cynthy had slipped
upon a piece of ice a few days before, and now she was never free from
the torturing, burning pain in her back. Sometimes it was in her head,
too, and then with shrill, harsh cries, she begged for Joe, until Granny
thanked God when the factory-whistle blew and she heard the man's quick,
short step on the pavement. Joe warmed himself at the fire for a moment,
then taking Cynthy in his tired arms, he walked slowly up and down the
room. Through the long, dreary night he patiently carried the moaning
child. If he attempted, never so carefully, to lay her down, she clung
to him so wildly or cried so wearily that Joe could only soothe her
and take lip the tiresome march again. Granny, thoroughly worn out, sat
sleeping in her large chair. Cynthy grew more restless. Once she nearly
sprang from Joe's arms, screaming, “Go way, Mariar; you're a hateful
thing! I won't listen; 'tain't true; Joe is good,” and dropping back
heavily, she whispered, “I love you, Joe.” She knew, then! Joe thought
his heart would never throb again.
He listened for the early morning whistles. One by one they sounded on
the clear, keen air, but never the one for which he waited. As soon
as it was light, he peered through the ice-covered window at the tall
chimneys just beyond the “Row.” They rose grim and silent, but no smoke
issued from them. The end had come. Joe knew a strike was on.
Sometime in the afternoon of that day Cynthy suffered herself to be
placed on the small, white bed; but she was not willing Joe should leave
her, and was quiet only when he held her feeble hand in his close grasp.
No sound escaped the man's white lips. Only God and the angels watched
his struggle with the powers of darkness. As night came on again, Cynthy
sank into a heavy sleep, and Joe, released, took his hat and went out
very softly.
He stopped after a long walk at the massive doors of a “West End”
palace. He followed with downcast eyes the servant who answered his ring
into a small but elegant reception-room, where he was told he might wait
for the master of the house, the owner of the large manufactory where he
was employed. Into the patient ear of this man, whom he had never seen
before, Joe poured the story of his life. The sin, the shame, the agony
of despair, his salvation through Cynthy.
“I will call my son,” said the sympathizing old gentleman as Joe rose to
go; “he is one of Danvers' best physicians. He will go with you and see
what can be done for the little girl.”
An hour later the two men were bending over the sick child. “She is very
ill,” said the young doctor, in reply ta Joe's mute, appealing face.
“This stupor may end in death, or it may result in a sleep which will
bring relief. You must be brave, my friend. A few hours to-night will
decide. You may hope.” Joe's weary limbs faltered beneath him. He fell
upon his knees breathing a wordless prayer that the child might be
spared to bless and comfort hi& lonely, aching heart; while all unseen
the Angel of Life hovered over the little bed.
[Illustration: 5372]