The road came pouring down from the wooded hills, and the house faced
the pond as before. But there was a new guest in the house. Up-stairs,
in a room with a sloping wall and a low ceiling and a dormer window, sat
a young man whose face had been prominent so long in the press and in
the court-room that now he preferred to keep away from human eyes. So he
sat in the little room and read eternally. He had acquired the habit of
books in the whitewashed cell where he had spent the three of his years
that should have been the happiest, busiest, best of all. He read
anything he could find now--old books, old magazines, old newspapers.
Finally he read even the old family Bible his mother had toted into his
room for his comfort. It was a bulky tome with print of giant size and
pictures of crude imagery, with here and there blank pages for recording
births, deaths, marriages. Here he found the names of all his brothers
and sisters, and all of them were entered among the deaths. The manners
of the deaths were recorded in the shaky handwriting of fresh grief:
Alice Anne, scarlet fever; James Arthur, Jr., convulsions; Andrew
Morton, whooping-cough; Cicely Jane, typhoid; Amos Turner, drowned
while saving his brother Stephen's life; Edward John, killed in train
wreck.
Sick at heart, he turned away from the record, but the book fell open of
itself at a full-page insert of the Decalogue, illuminated by some
artless printer with gaudy splotches of gold, red and blue and green
initials, and silly curlicues of arabesque, as if the man had been
ignorant of what they meant, those ten pillars of the world.
Stephen smiled wanly at the bad taste of the decoration, till one line
of fire leaped from the text at him, "Thou Shalt Not Kill." But he
needed no further lessoning in that wisdom. He retreated from the
accusing page and went to lean against the dormer window and look out
upon the world from the jail of his past. No jury could release him from
that. Everywhere he looked, everywhere he thought, he saw evidence of
the penalty he had brought upon his father and mother, more than upon
himself and his future. He knew that his father's life-work had been
ruined, and that his honorable career would be summed up in the
remembrance that he was the old man who bankrupted himself to save his
son from the gallows. He knew that this very house, which remained as
the last refuge, was mortgaged again as when his father and mother had
come into it before he was born. The ironic circle was complete.
Down-stairs he could hear the slow and heavy footsteps of his father,
and the creak of the chair as he dropped heavily into it. Then he heard
the screen-door flap and heard his mother's rocking-chair begin its
seesaw strain. He knew that their tired old hands would be
clasped and that their tired old eyes would be staring off at the
lightning-shattered oaks. He heard them say, just about as always:
"What you been doin', Paw?"
"Just putterin' 'round the barn. What you been doin', Maw?"
"Just putterin' 'round the kitchen gettin' supper started. I went
up-stairs and knocked at Stevie's door. He didn't answer. Guess he's
asleep."
"Guess so."
"It seems awful good, Paw, to be back in this old place, don't it?--you
and me just settin' here and our boy safe and sound asleep up-stairs."
"That's so. As the fellow says in the circus, here we are again, Maw."
"Here we are again, Paw."