The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864

He stopped abruptly, playing with a shell on the mantel-shelf.

"I understand," in a dry voice; "you want him robbed; and my hands came at the right nick of time."

"Pish! you use coarse words. A man's brain must be distempered to call that robbery; the paper, as I said, is neither money nor its equivalent."

There was a silence of some moments.

"I must have it," his eye growing fierce. "You could take it and leave the man unhurt. I could have done it myself, but he's an old man, I want him left unhurt. If I had done it—Well," chewing his lips, "it would not have been convenient for him to have gone on with that story. He knows me. Is the affair quite plain now?"

Yarrow nodded slowly, looking in the fire.

"If I were not strong enough to-morrow, what then?"

"I will be with you,—near. I must have the paper. He is an old Shylock, after all," with a desperate carelessness. "His soul would not weigh heavily against me, if it were let out."

Yarrow passed his hand over his face; it was colorless. Yet he looked bewildered. The bare thought of murder was not clear to him yet.

"Drink some wine, Stephen," said his brother, pouring out a goblet for himself. "I carry my own drinking-apparatus. This Sherry"—

Yarrow tasted it, and put down the glass.

"I was cheated in it, eh?"

"Yes, you were."

"Your palate was always keener than mine. I"—

His mouth looked blue and cold under his whiskers: then they both stood vacantly silent, while the woman sewed.

"Tut! we will look at the matter practically, as business-men," said Soulé at last, affecting a gruff, hearty tone, and walking about,—but was silent there.

The convict did not answer. No sound but the rough wind without blowing the drifted snow and pebbles from the asphalt roof against the frosted panes, and the angry fire of bitumen within breaking into clefts of blue and scarlet flame, thrusting its jets of fierce light out from its cage: impatient, it may be, of this convict, this sickly, shrivelled bit of humanity standing there; wondering the nauseated life in his nostrils or soul claimed yet its share of God's breath. Society had taken the man like a root torn out of native unctuous soil, kept it in a damp cellar, hid out the breath and light. If after a while it withered away, whose fault was it? If there were no hand now to plant it again, do you look for it to grow rotten, or not? One would have said Soulé was a root that had been planted in fat, loamy ground, to look at him. There was a healthy, liberal, lazy life for you! Yet the winter sky looked gray and dumb when he passed the window, and the fire-light broke fiercest against his bluff figure going to and fro. No matter; something there that would have warmed your heart to him: something genial, careless, big-natured, from the loose red hair to the indolent, portly stride. "Who knows? A comfortable, true-hearted, merry clergyman,—a jolly farmer, with open house, and a bit of good racing-stock in the stable,—if bigotry in his boyhood, and this woman, had not crossed him. They had crossed him: there was not an atom of unpolluted nature left: you saw the taint in every syllable he spoke. Fresh and malignant to-night, when this tempted soul hung in the balance.

"We're letting the matter slip too long. Something must be decided upon. Stephen!" nervously, "wake up! You have forgotten our subject, I think."

"No," the bald head raised out of the coat-collar in which it had sunk. "Go on."

Soulé looked at him perplexed a moment. Was he dulled, or had he learned in those years to shut in looks and thoughts closer prisoners than himself?

"It is a mere question of time," he said, a little composed. "Frazier is an agent: shall this money accrue to me or to his employers? I have risked all on it. I must have it at any cost."

"At any cost?"

"At any," boldly. "Is it any easier for me to talk of that chance than you, Stephen?"

"No, John. Your hands are clean," with an exhausted look. "I know that. You had a kind Irish heart. What money you made with one hand you flung away with the other."

Soulé blushed like a woman.

"No matter," beating some dust off his boot. "But for Frazier,—I've talked that over with Judith, and—I don't value human life as you do: it may Lave been my residence in the South. It matters little how a man dies, so he lives right. This Frazier, if he dies to defend his package, would do a nobler deed than in any of his dime-scraping days. For me, my part is not robbery. The paper is neither specie nor a draft."

His tongue swung fluently now, for it had convinced himself.

"There is but a night left to decide. What will you do, Stephen?"

He put his hand on the green coat with its gaudy buttons, and leaned against his brother as they used to go arms over shoulders to school. Soulé's big throat was full of tears; he had never felt so full of sorrowful pity as in this the foulest purpose of his life. Unselfish it seemed to him. O God! what a hard life Stephen's had been! This would cure him: two or three sea-voyages, a winter in Florence, would freshen him a little, maybe,—but not much.

"Eh? What will you do, old fellow?" striking his shoulder. "This is the last night."

"I know that. I have been waiting for it all my life."

He put his red handkerchief up to his mouth to conceal the face, as if its meaning were growing too plain. Soulé looked at him fixedly a moment, then, taking him by the button, began tapping off his sentences on his breast.

"I'll state the case. I'll be plain. Stephen, you want food; you want clothes; you"—

"Is that all I want?" facing him.

The woman started, as she saw his face fully, and his look, for the first time. A quiet blue eye, unutterably kind and sad: a slow, compelling face, that would look on his life barely, day after day, year after year, never drowsing over its sore or pain until he had wrung its full meaning out to the last dregs.

"All you want? Clothing? food?" stammered Soulé,—something in the face having stopped his garrulous breath. "I did not say that, Stephen."

The wind struck sharper on the rattling panes; the yellow and brown heats grew deeper. One saw how it was then. No beggar turned from God so empty-handed as this man to-day. His place in the world slipped: his chance gone: sick, sinking; his brain mad for knowledge: his hands stretched out for work: no man to give it to him: whatever God he had lost to him: the thief's smell, he thought, on every breath he drew, every rag of clothes he wore. Hundreds of convicts leave our prison-doors with souls as hungry and near death as this.

"I have lost something—since I went in there," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "I do not think it will ever come back."

"No?"

Soulé put his big hand to his face mechanically.

"Don't say that, boy! I know—The world has gone on, it has left you behind—You"—

He choked,—could not go on: he would have put half the strength and life in himself into Yarrow's lank little body that moment, if he could. There was a something else lost, different from all these, of which they both thought, but they did not speak of it. The convict looked out into the night. Beyond the square patch of window and that near dark, how full the world was of happy homes getting ready for Christmas! children and happy wives! Soulé understood.

"I don't say I can bring you back what you have lost, Stephen. I offer you the best I can. You're not an old man,—barely thirty: you must have years to acquire fresh bone and muscle. Set your brain to work, meanwhile. Give it a chance."

"It never had one," said the convict, with a queer, faint smile.

"Hillo! that looks like old times!" brightening up. "No, it never had. Do you think I forget our alley-house with its three rooms? the carpentering by day, and the arithmetic by night? the sweltering, sultry Sunday mornings in church, and the afternoons sniffling over the catechism among the rain-butts in the back-yard? Do you remember the preachers, the travelling agents, that put up with us? how they snarled at other churches, and helped themselves out of the shop, as if to be a man of God implied a mean beggar? I don't say my father was a hypocrite when he made you a colporteur, and so one of them; but"—

He paused. Even in this frothy-brained fellow, his religion or his doubt lay deeper than all. His face grew dark.

"I tell you, if there is one thing I loathe, it is the God and His day that were taught to me when I was a child: joyless, hard, cruel. Fire—humph!—and brimstone for all but a few hundred. I remember. Well, I don't know yet if there is any better," with a vague look. "A man shifts for himself in the next chance as well as now, I suppose. Did you believe what you preached, Stephen?" with an abrupt change. "God! how you used to writhe under it at first!"

"They forced me into it," said Yarrow. "I was only a boy. You remember that I was only a boy,—just out of the shop. The more uneducated a man was in our church-pulpit then, the better. I knew nothing, John," appealingly. "When I preached about foreordination and hell-fire, it was in coarse slang: I knew that. I used to think there might be a different God and books and another life farther out in the world, if I could only get at it. I never was strong, and they had forced me into it; and when you came to me to help you with your plan, I wanted to get out, and"—

"You did help me,"—chafing the limp fingers. "That was my first start, that Pesson note. I owe that to you, Stephen."

"I have paid for it," looking him steadily in the eye, some unexpected manliness rising up, making his tone bitter and marrowy. "I paid for it. But no matter for that. But now you come again. I have had time to think over these things in yonder, John."