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.