THE CONVICT
"My dear Bishop!" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand; "won't you come here and talk
to this little girl?"
"To Hagar?" answered the Bishop. "What is the trouble with Hagar?
Have you broken your doll, poor dear?" He came easily across to the
horsehair sofa, a good man, by definition, as ever was. "What's
grieving you, little girl?"
"I think that it is Hagar who may come to grieve others," said Mrs.
LeGrand. "I do not suppose it is my business to interfere,--as I should
interfere were she in my charge at Eglantine,--but I cannot but see in
my daily task how difficult it is to eradicate from a youthful mind the
stain that has been left by an improper book--"
"An improper book! What are you doing, Hagar, with an improper book?"
The Bishop put out his hand and took it. He looked at the title and at
the author's name beneath, turned over a dozen pages, closed the book,
and put it from him on the cold, bare mahogany table. "It was not for
this that I christened you," he said.
Miss Serena joined the group.
"Serena," appealed Mrs. LeGrand, "_do_ you think Hagar ought to be
allowed to contaminate her mind by a book like that?"
Miss Serena looked. "That child!--She's been reading Darwin!"
A slow colour came into her cheeks. The book was shocking, but the
truly shocking thing was how absolutely Hagar had disobeyed. Miss
Serena's soul was soft as wax, pliant as a reed to the authorities her
world ranged before her. By an inevitable reaction stiffness showed
in the few cases where she herself held the orb of authority. To be
disobeyed was very grievous to her. Where it was only negligence in
regard to some command of her own,--direction to a servant, commands
in her Sunday-School class,--she had often to put up with it, though
always with a swelling sense of injury. But when things combined,
when disobedience to Serena Ashendyne was also disobedience to the
constituted authorities, Miss Serena became adamant.
Now she looked at Hagar with a little gasp, and then, seeing through
the open door the elder Mrs. Ashendyne entering from the kitchen, she
called to her. "Mother, come here a moment!"...
"If she had said that she was sorry," pronounced the Bishop, "you might
forgive her, I think, this time. But if she is going to harden her
heart like that, you had best let her see that all sin, in whatever
degree, brings suffering. And I should suit, I think, the punishment
to the offence. Hagar told me only yesterday that she had rather read
a book than gather cherries or play with dolls, or go visiting, or
anything. I think I should forbid her to open any book at all for a
week."
Behind Gilead Balm, beyond the orchard and a strip of meadow, sprang
a ridge of earth, something more than a hill, something less than
a low mountain. It was safe, dry, warm, and sandy, too cut-over
and traversed to be popular with snakes, too within a stone's throw
of the overseer's house and the overseer's dogs to be subject to
tramps or squirrel-hunting boys, just wooded enough and furrowed with
shallow ravines to make it to children a romantic, sprite-inhabited
region. When children came to Gilead Balm, as sometimes, in the slow,
continuous procession through the houses of a people who traditionally
kept "open house," they did come, Hagar and they always played
freely and alone on the home-ward-facing side of the ridge. When the
overseer's grandchildren, too, came to visit him, they and Hagar played
here, and sometimes Mary Magazine, Isham and Car'line's ten-year-old
at the Ferry, was allowed to spend the day, and she and Hagar played
together on the ridge. Hagar was very fond of Mary Magazine.
One day, having completed her circle of flower dolls before her
companion's was done, she leaned back against the apple tree beneath
which the two were seated and thoughtfully regarded the other's
down-bent brown face and "wrapped" hair. "Mary Magazine, you couldn't
have been named 'Mary Magazine.' You were named Mary Magdalene."
"No'm," said Mary Magazine, a pink morning-glory in one hand and a
blue one in the other. "No'm. I'm named Mary Magazine. My mammy done
named me for de lady what took her cologne bottle somebody give her
Christmas, an' poured it on her han' an' rubbed Jesus' feet."
When Mary Magazine didn't come to Gilead Balm and no children were
staying in the house, and the overseer's grandchildren were at their
home on the other side of the county, Hagar might--provided always she
let some one know where she was going--Hagar might play alone on the
ridge. To-day, having asked the Colonel if she might, she was playing
there alone.
"Playing" was the accepted word. They always talked of her as
"playing," and she herself repeated the word.
"May I go play awhile on the ridge?"
"I reckon so, Gipsy. Wear your sunbonnet and don't get into any
mischief."
At the overseer's house she stopped to talk with Mrs. Green, picking
pease in the garden. "Mahnin', Hagar," said Mrs. Green. "How's yo' ma
this mahnin'?"
"I think she's better, Mrs. Green. She laughed a little this morning.
Grandmother let me stay a whole half-hour, and mother talked about
_her_ grandmother, and about picking up shells on the beach, and about
a little boat that she used to go out to sea in. She said that all last
night she felt that boat beneath her. She laughed and said it felt like
going home.--Only"--Hagar looked at Mrs. Green with large, wistful
eyes--"only home's really Gilead Balm."
"Of course it is," said Mrs. Green cheerfully. She sat down on an
overturned bucket between the green rows of pease, and pushed back
her sunbonnet from her kind, old wrinkled face. "I remember when yo'
ma came here jest as well. She was jest the loveliest thing!--But of
course all her own people were a good long way off, and she was a
seafarer herself, and she couldn't somehow get used to the hills. I've
heard her say they jest shut her in like a prison.... But then, after
a while, you came, an' I reckon, though she says things sometimes,
wherever you are she feels to be home. When it comes to being a woman,
the good Lord has to get in com-pensation somewhere, or I don't reckon
none of us could stand it.--I'm glad she's better."
"_I'm_ glad," said Hagar. "Can I help you pick the pease, Mrs. Green?"
"Thank you, child, but I've about picked the mess. You goin' to play
on the ridge? I wish Thomasine and Maggie and Corker were here to play
with you."
"I wish they were," said Hagar. Her eyes filled. "It's a very lonesome
day. Yesterday was lonesome and to-morrow's going to be lonesome--"
"Haven't you got a good book? I never see such a child for books."
Two tears came out of Hagar's eyes. "I was reading a book Aunt Serena
told me not to read.--And now I'm not to read _anything_ for a whole
week."
"Sho!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "What did you do that for? Don't you know
that little girls ought to mind?"
Hagar sighed. "Yes, I suppose they ought.... I wish I had now.... It's
so lonesome not to read when your mother's sick and grandmother won't
let me go into the room only just a little while morning and evening."
"Haven't you got any pretty patchwork nor nothin'?"
Hagar standing among the blush roses, looked at her with sombre eyes.
"Mrs. Green, I hate to sew."
"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "That's an awful thing to say!"
She sat on the overturned bucket, between the pale-green, shiny-podded
peavines, her friendly old face, knobbed and wrinkled like a Japanese
carving, gleaming from between the faded blue slats of her sunbonnet,
and she regarded the child before her with real concern. "I wonder
now," she said, "if you're goin' to grow up a rebel? Look-a-here,
honey, there ain't a mite of ease and comfort on that road."
"That's what the Yankees called us all," said Hagar. 'Rebels.'"
"Ah, I don't mean 'rebel' that-er-way," said Mrs. Green. "There's
lonelier and deeper ways of rebellin'. You don't get killed with an
army cheerin' you, and newspapers goin' into black, and a state full
of people, that were 'rebels' too, keepin' your memory green,--what
happens, happens just to you, by yourself without any company, and no
wreaths of flowers and farewell speeches. They just open the door and
put you out."
"Out where?"
"Out by yourself. Out of this earth's favour. And, though we mayn't
think it," said Mrs. Green, "this earth's favour is our sunshine. It's
right hard to go where there isn't any sunshine.... I don't know why
I'm talking like this to you--but you're a strange child and always
were, and I reckon you come by it honest!" She rose from among the
peavines. "Well, I've been baking apple turnovers, and they ain't bad
to picnic on! Suppose you take a couple up on the ridge with you."
There grew, on the very top of the ridge, a cucumber tree that
Hagar loved. Underneath was a little fine, sparse grass and enough
pennyroyal to make the place aromatic when the sunshine drew out all
its essence, as was the case to-day. Over the light soil, between the
sprigs of pennyroyal, went a line of ants carrying grains of some
pale, amber-clear substance. Hagar watched them to their hill. When,
one by one, they had entered, a second line of foragers emerged and
went off to the right through the grass. In a little time these, too,
reappeared, each carrying before her a tiny bead of the amber stuff.
Hagar watched, elbows on ground and chin on hands. She had a feeling
that they were people, and she tried giving them names, but they were
so bewilderingly alike that in a moment she could not tell which was
"Brownie" and which "Pixie" and which "Slim." She turned upon her back
and lying in the grass and pennyroyal saw above her only blue sky and
blue sky. She stared into it. "If the angels were sailing like the
birds up there and looking down--and looking down--we people might
seem all alike to them--all alike and not doing things that were very
different--all alike.... Only there are our clothes. Pink ones and blue
ones and white ones and black ones and plaid ones and striped ones--"
She stared at the blue until she seemed to see step after step of blue,
a great ladder leading up, and then she turned on her side and gazed at
Gilead Balm and, a mile away, the canal and the shining river.
She could see many windows, but not her mother's window. She had to
imagine that. Lonesomeness and ennui, that had gone away for a bit in
the interest of watching the ants, returned full force. She stood up
and cast about for something to break the spell.
The apple turnovers wrapped in a turkey-red, fringed napkin, rested in
a small willow basket upon the grass. Hagar was not hungry, but she
considered that she might as well eat a turnover, and then that she
might as well have a party and ask a dozen flower dolls. Her twelve
years were as a moving plateau--one side a misty looming landscape of
the mind, older and higher than her age would forecast; on the other,
green, hollow, daisy-starred meadows of sheer childhood. Her attention
passed from side to side, and now it settled in the meadows.
She considered the grass beneath the cucumber tree for a dining-room,
and then she grew aware that she was thirsty, and so came to the
conclusion that she would descend the back side of the ridge to the
spring and have the party there. Crossing the hand's breadth of level
ground she began to climb down the long shady slope toward a stream
that trickled through a bit of wood and a thicket, and a small,
ice-cold spring in a ferny hollow. The sun-bathed landscape, river and
canal and fields and red-brick Gilead Balm with its cedars, and the
garden and orchard, and the overseer's house sank from view. There was
only the broad-leaved cucumber tree against the deep blue sky. The
trunk of the cucumber tree disappeared, and then the greater branches,
and then the lesser branches toward the top, and then the bushy green
top itself. When Hagar and the other children played on the ridge, they
followed her lead and called this side "the far country." To them--or
perhaps only to Hagar--it had a clime, an atmosphere quite different
from the homeward-facing side.
When she came to the spring at the foot of the ridge she was very
thirsty. She knelt on a great sunken rock, and, taking off her
sunbonnet, leaned forward between the fern and mint, made a cup of
her hands and drank the sparkling water. When she had had all she
wished, she settled back and regarded the green, flowering thicket.
It came close to the spring, filling the space between the water
and the wood, and it was a wild, luxuriant tangle. Hagar's fancy
began to play with it. Now it was a fairy wood for Thumbelina--now
Titania and Oberon danced there in the moonlight--now her mind gave it
height and hugeness, and it was the wood around the Sleeping Beauty.
The light-winged minutes went by and then she remembered the apple
turnovers.... Here was the slab of rock for the table. She spread the
turkey-red napkin for cloth, and she laid blackberry leaves for plates,
and put the apple turnovers grandly in the middle. Then she moved about
the hollow and gathered her guests. Wild rose, ox-eye daisy, Black-eyed
Susan, elder, white clover, and columbine--quite a good party.... She
set each with due ceremony on the flat rock, before a blackberry-leaf
plate, and then she took her own place facing the thicket, and after
a polite little pause, folded her hands and closed her eyes. "We will
say," she said, "a silent Grace."
When she opened her eyes, she opened them full upon other
eyes--haggard, wolfishly hungry eyes, looking at her from out the
thicket, behind them a body striped like a wasp....
"I didn't mean to scare you," said the boy, "but if you ever went most
of two days and a night without anything to eat, you'd know how it
felt."
"I never did," said Hagar. "But I can imagine it. I wish I had asked
Mrs. Green for _five_ apple turnovers." As she spoke, she pushed the
red fringed napkin with the second turnover toward him. "Eat that one,
too. I truly don't want any, and the flowers are never hungry."
He bit into the second turnover. "It seems mean to eat up your
tea-party, but I'm 'most dead, and that's the truth--"
Hagar, sitting on the great stone with her hands folded in her lap
and her sunbonnet back on her shoulders, watched her suddenly acquired
guest. He would not come clear out of the thicket; the tangled growth
held him all but head and shoulders. "I believe I've seen you before,"
she said at last. "About two weeks ago grandfather and Aunt Serena and
I were on the packet-boat. Weren't you at the lock up the river? The
boat went down and down until you were standing 'way up, just against
the sky. I am almost sure it was you."
He reddened. "Yes, it was me." Then, dropping the arm that held the yet
uneaten bit of turnover, he broke out. "I didn't run away while I was a
trusty! I wouldn't have done it! One of the men lied about me and said
dirty words about my people, and I jumped on him and knocked his head
against a stone until he didn't come to for half an hour! Then they did
things to me, and did what they called degrading me. 'No more trustying
for you!' said the boss. So I run away--three days ago." He wiped his
forehead with his sleeve. "It seems more like three years. I reckon
they've got the dogs out."
"What have they got the dogs out for?"
"Why, to hunt me. I--I--"
His voice sunk. Terror came back, and will-breaking fear, a chill
nausea and swooning of the soul. He groaned and half rose from the
thicket. "I was lying here till night, but I reckon I'd better be
going--" His eyes fell upon his body and he sank back. "O God! I reckon
in hell we'll wear these clothes."
Hagar stared at him, faint reflecting lines of anxiety and unhappiness
on her brow, quiverings about her lips. "Ought you to have run away?
Was it right to run away?" The colour flooded her face. It was always
hard for her to tell of her errors, but she felt that she and the boy
were in somewhat the same case, and that she ought to do it. "I did
something my aunt had told me not to do. It was reading a book that
she said was wicked. I can't see yet that it was wicked. It was very
interesting. But the Bishop said that he didn't christen me for that,
and that it was a sin. And now, for a whole week, grandmother says that
I'm not to read any book at all--which is very hard. What I mean is,"
said Hagar, "though I don't feel yet that there was anything wicked in
that book (I didn't read much of it), I feel perfectly certain that I
ought to obey grandmother. The Bible tells you so, and I believe in the
Bible." Her brow puckered again. "At least, I believe that I believe
in the Bible. And if there wasn't anybody in the house, and the most
interesting books were lying around, I wouldn't--at least I think I
wouldn't--touch one till the week is over." She tried earnestly to
explain her position. "I mean that if I really did wrong--and I reckon
I'll have to say that I oughtn't to have disobeyed Aunt Serena, though
the Bible doesn't say anything about aunts--I'll take the hard things
that come after. Of course"--she ended politely--"your folks may have
been mistaken, and you may not have done anything wrong at all--"
The boy bloomed at her. "I'll tell you what I did. I live 'way out in
the mountains, the other end of nowhere. Well, Christmas there was a
dance in the Cove, and I went, but Nancy Horn, that had promised to go
with me, broke her word and went with Dave Windless. There was a lot of
apple jack around, and I took more'n I usually take. And then, when
we were dancing the reel, somebody--and I'll swear still it was Dave,
though he swore in the court-room it wasn't--Dave Windless put out his
foot and tripped me up! Well, Nancy, she laughed.... I don't remember
anything clear after that, and I thought that the man who was shooting
up the room was some other person, though I did think it was funny the
pistol was in my hand.... Anyhow, Dave got a ball through his hip, and
old Daddy Jake Willy, that I was awful fond of and wouldn't have hurt
not for a still of my own and the best horse on the mountain, he got
his bow arm broken, and one of the women was frightened into fits, and
next week when her baby was born and had a harelip she said I'd done
it.... Anyhow the sheriff came and took me--it was about dawn, 'way up
on the mountain-side, and I still thought it was another man going away
toward Catamount Gap and the next county where there wasn't any Nancy
Horn--I thought so clear till I fired at the sheriff and broke his
elbow and the deputy came up behind and twisted the pistol away, and
somebody else threw a gourd of water from the spring over me ... and I
come to and found it had been me all the time.... That's what I did,
and I got four years."
"Four years?" said Hagar. "Four years in--in jail?"
"In the penitentiary," said the boy. "It's a worse word than jail....
I know what's right and wrong. Liquor's wrong, and the Judge said
carrying concealed weapons was wrong, and I reckon it is, though there
isn't much concealment when everybody knows you're wearing them....
Yes, liquor's wrong, and quarrels might go off just with some words
and using your fists if powder and shot weren't right under your hand,
tempting you. Yes, drinking's wrong and quarreling's wrong, and after I
come to my senses it didn't need no preacher like those that come round
Sundays to tell me that. But I tell you what's the whole floor space of
hell wronger than most of the things men do and that's the place the
lawyers and the judges and the juries send men to!"
"Do you mean that they oughtn't to--to do anything to you? You _did_ do
wrong."
"No, I don't mean that," said the boy. "I've got good sense. If I
didn't see it at first, old Daddy Jake Willy came to the county jail
three or four times, and he made me see it. The Judge and the lawyer
couldn't ha' made me see it, but _he_ did. And at last I was willing
to go." His face worked. "The day before I was to go I was in that
cell I'd stayed in then two months and I looked right out into the
sunshine. You could see Old Rocky Knob between two bars, and Bear's
Den between two, and Lonely River running down into the valley between
the other two, and the sun shining over everything--shining just like
it's shining to-day. Well, I stood there, looking out, and made a
good resolution. I was going to take what was coming to me because I
deserved it, having broken the peace and lamed men and hurt a woman,
and broken Daddy Jake's arm and fired at the sheriff. I hadn't meant
to do all that, but still I had done it. So I said, 'I'll take it. And
I won't give any trouble. And I'll keep the rules. If it's a place to
make men better in, I'll come out a better man. I'll work just as hard
as any man, and if there's books to study I'll study, and I'll keep the
rules and try to help other people, and when I come out, I'll be young
still and a better man.'" He rose to his full height in the thicket,
the upper half of his striped body showing like a swimmer's above the
matted green. He sent out his young arms in a wide gesture at once
mocking and despairing, but whether addressed to earth or heaven was
not apparent. "You see, I didn't know any more about that place than a
baby unborn!"
With that he dropped like a stone back into the thicket and lay dumb
and close, with agonized eyes. Around the base of the ridge out of the
wood came the dogs; behind them three men with guns.
...One of the men was a jolly, fatherly kind of person. He tried to
explain to Hagar that they weren't really going to hurt the convict at
all--she saw for herself that the dogs hadn't hurt him, not a mite!
The handcuffs didn't hurt him either--they were loose and comfortable.
No; they weren't going to do anything to him, they were just going
to take him back.--He hadn't hurt her, had he? hadn't said anything
disagreeable to her or done anything but eat up her tea-party?--Then
that was all right, and the fatherly person would go himself with her
to the house and tell the Colonel about it. Of course he knew the
Colonel, everybody knew the Colonel! And "Stop crying, little lady!
That boy ain't worth it."
The Colonel's dictum was that the country was getting so damned
unsettled that Hagar must not again be let to play on the ridge alone.
Old Miss, who had had that morning a somewhat longish talk with Dr.
Bude, stated that she would tell Mary Green to send for Thomasine and
Maggie and Corker. "Dr. Bude thinks the child broods too much, and it
may be better to have healthy diversion for her in case--"
"In case--!" exclaimed Miss Serena. "Does he really think, mother, that
it's serious?"
"I don't think he knows," answered her mother. "I don't think it is,
myself. But Maria was never like anybody else--"
"Dear Maria!" said Mrs. LeGrand. "She should have made such a
brilliant, lovely woman! If only there was a little more compliance,
more feminine sweetness, more--if I may say so--unselfishness--"
"Where," asked the Bishop, "is Medway?"
Mrs. Ashendyne's needles clicked. "My son was in Spain, the last we
heard: studying the painter Murillo."