IN his room, solitary and brooding, sat the defeated hero of a hundred
fights. It was now twilight; but the shutters had been partially closed
all day, in order to exclude the sun, which had never before been
unwelcome to Tom Bowles, and they still remained so, making the twilight
doubly twilight, till the harvest moon, rising early, shot its ray
through the crevice, and forced a silvery track amid the shadows of the
floor.
The man’s head drooped on his breast; his strong hands rested
listlessly on his knees: his attitude was that of utter despondency and
prostration. But in the expression of his face there were the signs of
some dangerous and restless thought which belied not the gloom but the
stillness of the posture. His brow, which was habitually open and
frank, in its defying aggressive boldness, was now contracted into deep
furrows, and lowered darkly over his downcast, half-closed eyes. His
lips were so tightly compressed that the face lost its roundness, and
the massive bone of the jaw stood out hard and salient. Now and then,
indeed, the lips opened, giving vent to a deep, impatient sigh, but they
reclosed as quickly as they had parted. It was one of those crises in
life which find all the elements that make up a man’s former self in
lawless anarchy; in which the Evil One seems to enter and direct the
storm; in which a rude untutored mind, never before harbouring a thought
of crime, sees the crime start up from an abyss, feels it to be an
enemy, yet yields to it as a fate. So that when, at the last, some
wretch, sentenced to the gibbet, shudderingly looks back to the moment
“that trembled between two worlds,”--the world of the man guiltless,
the world of the man guilty,--he says to the holy, highly educated,
rational, passionless priest who confesses him and calls him “brother,”
“The devil put it into my head.”
At that moment the door opened; at its threshold there stood the man’s
mother--whom he had never allowed to influence his conduct, though he
loved her well in his rough way--and the hated fellow-man whom he longed
to see dead at his feet. The door reclosed: the mother was gone, without
a word, for her tears choked her; the fellow-man was alone with him. Tom
Bowles looked up, recognized his visitor, cleared his brow, and rubbed
his mighty hands.