THE OLD PRISONER.
In America again. Yes, fate has swept most of the characters of our
story across the ocean; but one remains behind to whom the kind heart
must turn with more solemn interest than the young, the beautiful, or
the lordly can inspire.
No changes had fallen upon that bleak, gloomy prison, whose very shadow,
as it lay across the dusty road, streamed out like a pall. Human crime
brings human misery, and that, crowded together and stifled under the
heel of the law, is a terrible, most terrible thing.
In the midst of this desolation, that old woman had lived and suffered
fourteen years, without a complaint, without once asking for the
freedom, which would have been so sweet to her, even of her God. She had
sinned deeply--how far, she and the Almighty, who knows all things,
alone could tell; but she had borne her punishment with much humility;
in her quiet way, had made her presence in that dreary place a blessing
to those more wretched than herself.
During that long, weary time many a poor prisoner had felt the comfort
of her presence near her sick couch and her grave. Kind looks had
cheered other desponding souls when words of compassion were forbidden
to her lips.
One day this woman sat at her task sewing on some heavy prison garments.
A skein of coarse thread hung about her neck, and a steel thimble was
upon her long, slender finger, where it had worn a ring about the nail
with incessant use.
She did not look up when the matron entered the room, but worked on,
with steady purpose, not caring to see that strange gentleman who came
in with the matron, and stood looking kindly upon her.
"Mrs. Yates."
The old woman lifted her head with a suddenness that almost shook the
iron spectacles from her face. Her eyes encountered those of the
gentleman, and she stood up meekly, like a school-girl aroused from her
task, and remained, with her eyes bent on the floor, waiting for the man
to pass on. He did not move, however, but stood gazing upon her
snow-white hair, her thin old face, and the gentle stoop that had, at
last, bent her shoulders a little, with infinite compassion in his face.
"Mrs. Yates, why do you stand so motionless? How is it that your eyes
turn so steadily to the floor?"
The old woman lifted her eyes slowly to that calm, thin face. She did
not know it, had never seen it before in her life; but it was so seldom
any one spoke to her, that a soft glow of comfort stole to her heart as
she looked, and two great tears rolled from under her spectacles. Then
she remembered that he had asked something.
"In prison, here, we get a down look," she said, with pathetic
simplicity.
"But you will look in my face now."
She did gaze at him earnestly; but shook her head and dropped her eyes,
for the force of habit was still upon her.
"I do not know you," she murmured.
"Did you then expect some friend?" asked the gentleman.
"I have no friends," was the sad reply.
"Does no one come to see you?"
"Years ago my son used to come and his wife, too; but they are both
dead."
"Poor woman!"
She looked up again with a glance of earnest surprise. She was so unused
to pity that the compassionate voice brought a dry sob to her throat.
"Are you content here? Tell me."
"Yes, I am content."
Her voice was low, but inexpressibly mournful.
"I know the crime for which you were committed," said the gentleman,
"and have read the case over. Tell me, were you guilty?"
The old woman lifted her eyes slowly, and replied:
"Yes, I was a guilty woman."
"But were you, before God, guilty of murder?"
She met his eyes steadily. He saw a quiver of pain sweep over her
features, and the thin lips began to stir.
"He is dead, my innocent, my honest son. Nothing can harm him now. I
have not suffered in vain. Before God I was not guilty of murder, but
terribly guilty in taking this crime on myself: but it was to save him,
and I cannot repent, I cannot repent, and in that lies double guilt!"
The stranger searched her features keenly as she spoke. Perhaps he was
prepared for this answer; but the light that came over his face was full
of compassion.
"Have you done with me?" questioned the old woman, in the meek, sad
voice that had become habitual to her. "Perhaps you will not believe me;
but God knows!"
The man turned from her and stepped into the matron's room.
The old woman sat down upon the bench from which she had arisen, took
the coarse needle from the bosom of her dress, where she had fastened it
when spoken to, and threaded it again; but her hand shook a little, and
the thread baffled her confused vision. Then the strange gentleman came
back again, smiling, and with moisture in his eyes.
"My good woman," he said, "put up your work. You did not know it, but I
am the Governor of New York, and your pardon has just gone to the
warden."
The needle dropped from one quivering old hand--a thread fell from its
companion.
"Pardon for me!"
Her lips were white, and the words trembled from them one by one. She
did not comprehend that this man had given her back to the world.
"It is true," said the matron, weeping the glad, sweet tears of a
benevolent heart, "His Excellency has pardoned you. This very hour you
are free to leave the prison."
"God help me! Oh! God help me!" cried the poor old woman, looking around
at her rude work and seating herself among it. "Where can I go?"
The Governor took some money from his pocket and laid it in her lap.
Then he went hastily from the room.
The matron sat down upon the bench, and clasped the withered hand in
hers.
"Have you no friend?"
"None."
"No duties left undone?"
The old woman drew herself up. Duties last longer than friends. Yes, she
had duties, and God had taken the shackles from her limbs that she might
perform them. Freedom was before her and an object. She arose gently and
looked around a little wildly.
"I will go now."
The matron went out and returned with a bundle of clothes and a black
bonnet upon which was some rusty crape; a huge, old-fashioned thing that
framed in her silver-white hair like a pent-house. The very shape and
fashion of this bonnet was pathetic--it spoke of so long ago. The black
dress and soft shawl with which she had come to the prison were a little
moth-eaten, but not much, for they had been carefully hoarded; but the
poor old woman looked with a sigh on her prison-dress as it fell to the
floor, and wept bitterly before she went out, as if that gloomy mass of
stones had been a pleasant home to her.
Slowly, and with a downcast look, the old woman went out of the prison,
up through the rugged quarries, where a gang of men were at work,
dragging their weary limbs from stone to stone, with the listless,
haggard effort of forced labor. Some of these men looked up, as she
passed them, and watched her with bitter envy.
"There goes a pardon," they said to each other; "and that old woman with
one foot in the grave, while we are young and strong! Freedom would be
everything to us; but what good will it do to her?"
So the poor old prisoner passed on, sadly bewildered and afraid, like a
homeless child, but thanking God for a mercy she could not yet realize.
There was one place to which she must go. It might be empty and
desolate, but there her son had died, and she had seen the roof of his
dwelling from the graveyard when they let her come out from prison to
see him buried.
She knew the road, for her path led to the grave first, and after that
she could find the way, for every step, so far, had been marked by a
pang, to which her heart was answering back now.
At sunset, that day, some workmen, passing the village burying-place,
saw an old woman sitting by a grave that had been almost forgotten in
the neighborhood.
She was looking dreary and forlorn in the damp enclosure, for clouds
were drifting low in the sky, and a cold rain was beginning to fall; but
they did not know that this poor woman had a home-feeling by that grave,
even with the rain falling, which belonged to no other place on earth.
A little later, when the gray darkness was creeping on, this same tall
figure might have been discovered moving through the rough cedar pillars
of the Yates cottage. There was no light in the house, for no human soul
lived beneath its roof; but a door was so lightly fastened that she got
it open with some effort, and entered what seemed to her like the
kitchen; for the last tenant had left some kindling-wood in the
fireplace, and two or three worn-out cooking utensils stood near the
hearth, where they were beginning to rust.
When she left the prison, the matron had, with many kind words, thrust a
parcel into the old woman's hand. Knowing her helplessness, she had
provided food for a meal or two, and to this had added some matches and
candles.
In the gray light which came through one of the windows, she untied this
parcel and found the candles. It seemed to the forlorn creature as if a
merciful God had sent them directly to her, and she fell upon her
knees, thanking Him. The light which she struck gave her the first gleam
of hope that her freedom had yet brought. She was at liberty to build a
fire on that dark hearth, and to sit there just as long as she pleased,
enjoying its warmth. The rain that began to rattle down on the low roof
made her shelter more pleasant. She began to realize that even in such
desolation liberty was sweet.
She built a fire with the dry wood, and its blaze soon filled the
kitchen with a golden glow. Her garments were wet, and a soft steam
arose from them as she sat, enveloping her in a gray cloud. The
loneliness might have been terrible to another person, but she had been
so long accustomed to the darkness and gloom of a prison cell, that this
illuminated space seemed broad as the universe to her.
After her clothes were dry, the old woman lighted her candle and began
to examine the house. The parlor was almost empty, and a gust of wind
took her candle as she opened the door, flaring back the flame into her
face. The wind came from a broken pane of glass in the oriel window,
through which a branch of ivy, and the long tendril of a Virginia
creeper had penetrated, and woven themselves in a garland along the
wall. A wren had followed the creeping greenness and built her nest in
the cornice, from which she flew frightened, when a light entered the
room.
The old woman went out disappointed. The thing she sought was not there;
perhaps it had been utterly destroyed. The man who had promised to keep
it sacred, lay sleeping up yonder in the graveyard. How could she expect
strangers to take up his trust? But if the object she sought could not
be found, what was the use of liberty to her. The one aim of her life
would be extinguished. She took up the candle and mounted a flight of
narrow stairs which led to the chambers.
They were all empty except one small room, where she found an iron
bedstead, on which some old quilts and refuse blankets were heaped.
Behind this bed, pressed into a corner, was an old chair, covered with
dust.
When she saw this, the light shook in her hand. She sat down upon the
bedstead, and reaching the candle out, examined the old chair, through
its veil of cobwebs. It was the same. How well she remembered that night
when her own hands had put on that green cover.
The chair was broken. One of its castors dropped to the floor as Mrs.
Yates drew it from the corner, and the carved wood-work came off in her
hand; the cushion was stained and torn in places, but this dilapidation
she knew had not reached her secret.
She took the chair in her arms and carried it down to the kitchen. Some
of the brass nails dropped loose on the stairs, but she took no heed of
them. All she wanted was some instrument with which she could turn the
ricketty thing into a complete wreck. In the drawer of a broken kitchen
table she found an old knife, with the blade half ground away. This she
whetted to an edge on the hearth, and directly the little brass nails
flew right and left, a mass of twisted fringe lay on the hearth, when
the old woman stood in a cloud of dust, holding the torn rep in her
hand. It dropped in a heap with the fringe, then the inner lining was
torn away, handsful of hair were pulled out from among the springs, and
that casket with a package of papers rustled and shook in the old
woman's hands.
Mrs. Yates trembled from head to foot. It was many long years since she
had touched heavy work like that, and it shocked her whole frame.
The dull monotony of sewing upon prison garments had undermined all her
great natural strength. She sat there panting for breath, and white to
the lips. The excitement had been too much for this poor prison woman.
She sat like a dazed creature, looking down into the casket which lay
open in her lap, with ten thousand rainbow fires leaping out of it, as
the blaze in the chimney quivered and danced and blazed over the
diamonds. That morning the old woman had crept out of prison in her
moth-eaten garments, and a little charity money in her bosom. Now a
fortune blazed up from her lap.
There was money, too, a purse heavy with sovereigns, dropped there from
the gold contained in that malachite box, from which all her awful
sorrows had sprung. She gathered up these things in the skirt of her
dress and sat brooding over them a long time, while the fire rose and
crackled, and shed warm floods of light all around her, and the rain
poured down in torrents. She was completely worn out at last, and
thought itself became a burden; then her head fell back upon the ruined
cushions of the chair, which held her in a half-sitting position, as the
heaviest sleep that ever came to mortal eyes fell upon her.
Still the rain poured down continually upon the roof and overran the
gutters in torrents. Up from the darkness of a hollow near by, the rush
and roar of a stream, swollen into a torrent, came through the beating
storm like a heavy bass voice pouring its low thunders through a strain
of music. The great elm tree at the end of the house tossed its
streaming branches, and beat them upon the roof, till a host of warriors
seemed breaking their way through, while the old vines were seized by
the wind and ripped from the sides of the house, as the storm seizes
upon the cords of a vessel, and tears them up into a net work of tangled
floss.
The old woman who had left her stone cell in the prison for the first
time in fourteen years, heard nothing of this, but lay half upon the
floor half on the broken chair, with the broad blaze of the fire
flashing over her white hair, and kindling up the diamonds in her lap to
a bed of living coals. She was perfectly safe with those treasures, even
in that lonely house, for in the pouring rain no human being was likely
to go about from his own free will. But one poor fellow, whose child was
desperately sick, did pass the house, and saw the blaze of a fire
breaking through a window, where the shutters were dashing to and fro on
their hinges, and found breath to say, as he sped on in search of a
doctor:
"So the cedar cottage has got another tenant at last. I wonder who it
is?"
When the man went by to his work, the next morning, he saw the shutters
swaying to and fro yet, and wondering at it, went into the enclosure, in
hopes of meeting some of the new inmates; but everything was still, the
doors were fastened, and through the kitchen window he saw nothing but a
heap of ashes on the hearth, and an old chair, torn to pieces, standing
before it.