The Mystery of Metropolisville Part 19

"NOT GUILTY!"

"Thank G.o.d!" whispered Isa.

The Poet shut his mouth and heaved a sigh of relief.

The counsel for the defense was electrified. Up to that moment he had believed that his client was guilty. But there was so much of solemn truthfulness in the voice that he could not resist its influence.

As for the trial itself, which came off two days later, that was a dull enough affair. It was easy to prove that Albert had expressed all sorts of bitter feelings toward Mr. Westcott; that he was anxious to leave; that he had every motive for wishing to pre-empt before Westcott did; that the land-warrant numbered so-and-so--it is of no use being accurate here, they were accurate enough in court--had been posted in Red Owl on a certain day; that a gentleman who rode with the driver saw him receive the mail at Red Owl, and saw it delivered at Metropolisville; that Charlton pre-empted his claim--the S.E. qr. of the N.E. qr., and the N.

1/2 of the S.E. qr. of Section 32, T. so-and-so, R. such-and-such--with this identical land-warrant, as the records of the land-office showed beyond a doubt.

Against all this counsel for defense had nothing whatever to offer.

Nothing but evidence of previous good character, nothing but to urge that there still remained perhaps the shadow of a doubt. No testimony to show from whom Charlton had received the warrant, not the first particle of reb.u.t.ting evidence. The District Attorney only made a little perfunctory speech on the evils brought upon business by theft in the post-office.

The exertions of Charlton's counsel amounted to nothing; the jury found him guilty without deliberation.

The judge sentenced him with much solemn admonition. It was a grievous thing for one so young to commit such a crime. He warned Albert that he must not regard any consideration as a justification for such an offense.

He had betrayed his trust and been guilty of theft. The judge expressed his regret that the sentence was so severe. It was a sad thing to send a young man of education and refinement to be the companion of criminals for so many years. But the law recognized the difference between a theft by a sworn and trusted officer and an ordinary larceny. He hoped that Albert would profit by this terrible experience, and that he would so improve the time of his confinement with meditation, that what would remain to him of life when he should come out of the walls of his prison might be spent as an honorable and law-abiding citizen. He sentenced him to serve the shortest term permitted by the statute, namely, ten years.

The first deep snow of the winter was falling outside the court-house, and as Charlton stood in the prisoners' box, he could hear the jingling of sleigh-bells, the sounds that usher in the happy social life of winter in these northern lat.i.tudes. He heard the judge, and he listened to the sleigh-bells as a man who dreams--the world was so far off from him now--ten weary years, and the load of a great disgrace measured the gulf fixed between him and all human joy and sympathy. And when, a few minutes afterward, the jail-lock clicked behind him, it seemed to have shut out life. For burial alive is no fable. Many a man has heard the closing of the vault as Albert Charlton did.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

THE PENITENTIARY.

It was a cold morning. The snow had fallen heavily the day before, and the Stillwater stage was on runners. The four horses rushed round the street-corners with eagerness as the driver, at a little past five o'clock in the morning, moved about collecting pa.s.sengers. From the up-town hotels he drove in the light of the gas-lamps to the jail where the deputy marshal, with his prisoner securely handcuffed, took his seat and wrapped the robes about them both. Then at the down-town hotels they took on other pa.s.sengers. The Fuller House was the last call of all.

"Haven't you a back-seat?" The pa.s.senger partly spoke and partly coughed out his inquiry.

"The back-seat is occupied by ladies," said the agent, "you will have to take the front one."

"It will kill me to ride backwards," whined the desponding voice of Minorkey, but as there were only two vacant seats he had no choice. He put his daughter in the middle while he took the end of the seat and resigned himself to death by retrograde motion. Miss Helen Minorkey was thus placed exactly _vis-a-vis_ with her old lover Albert Charlton, but in the darkness of six o'clock on a winter's morning in Minnesota, she could not know it. The gentleman who occupied the other end of the seat recognized Mr. Minorkey, and was by him introduced to his daughter. That lady could not wholly resist the exhilaration of such a stage-ride over snowy roads, only half-broken as yet, where there was imminent peril of upsetting at every turn. And so she and her new acquaintance talked of many things, while Charlton could not but recall his ride, a short half-year ago, on a front-seat, over the green prairies--had prairies ever been greener?--and under the blue sky, and in bright sunshine--had the sun ever shone so brightly?--with this same quiet-voiced, thoughtful Helen Minorkey. How soon had sunshine turned to darkness! How suddenly had the blossoming spring-time changed to dreariest winter!

It is really delightful, this riding through the snow and darkness in a covered coach on runners, this battling with difficulties. There is a spice of adventure in it quite pleasant if you don't happen to be the driver and have the battle to manage. To be a well-m.u.f.fled pa.s.senger, responsible for nothing, not even for your own neck, is thoroughly delightful--provided always that you are not the pa.s.senger in handcuffs going to prison for ten years. To the pa.s.senger in handcuffs, whose good name has been destroyed, whose liberty is gone, whose future is to be made of weary days of monotonous drudgery and dreary nights in a damp cell, whose friends have deserted him, who is an outlaw to society--to the pa.s.senger in handcuffs this dashing and whirling toward a living entombment has no exhilaration. Charlton was glad of the darkness, but dreaded the dawn when there must come a recognition. In a whisper he begged the deputy marshal to pull his cap down over his eyes and to adjust his woolen comforter over his nose, not so much to avoid the cold wind as to escape the cold eyes of Helen Minorkey. Then he hid his handcuffs under the buffalo robes so that, if possible, he might escape recognition.

The gentleman alongside Miss Minorkey asked if she had read the account of the trial of young Charlton, the post-office robber.

"Part of it," said Miss Minorkey. "I don't read trials much."

"For my part," said the gentleman, "I think the court was very merciful.

I should have given him the longest term known to the law. He ought to go for twenty-one years. We all of us have to risk money in the mails, and if thieves in the post-office are not punished severely, there is no security."

There spoke Commerce! Money is worth so much more than humanity, you know!

Miss Minorkey said that she knew something of the case. It was very curious, indeed. Young Charlton was disposed to be honest, but he was high-tempered. The taking of the warrant was an act of resentment, she thought. He had had two or three quarrels or fights, she believed, with the man from whom he took the warrant. He was a very talented young man, but very ungovernable in his feelings.

The gentleman said that that was the very reason why he should have gone for a longer time. A talented and self-conceited man of that sort was dangerous out of prison. As it was, he would learn all the roguery of the penitentiary, you know, and then we should none of us be safe from him.

There spoke the Spirit of the Law! Keep us safe, O Lord! whoever may go to the devil!

In reply to questions from her companion, Miss Minorkey told the story of Albert's conflict with Westcott--she stated the case with all the coolness of a dispa.s.sionate observer.

There was no sign--Albert listened for it--of the slightest sympathy for or against him in the matter. Then the story of little Katy was told as one might tell something that had happened a hundred years ago, without any personal sympathy. It was simply a curious story, an interesting adventure with which to beguile a weary hour of stage riding in the darkness. It would have gratified Albert to have been able to detect the vibration of a painful memory or a pitying emotion, but Helen did not suffer her placidity to be ruffled by disturbing emotion. The conversation drifted to other subjects presently through Mr. Minorkey's sudden recollection that the drowning excitement at Metropolisville had brought on a sudden attack of his complaint, he had been seized with a pain just under his ribs. It ran up to the point of the right shoulder, and he thought he should die, etc., etc., etc. Nothing saved him but putting his feet into hot water, etc., etc., etc.

The gray dawn came on, and Charlton was presently able to trace the lineaments of the well-known countenance. He was not able to recognize it again without a profound emotion, an emotion that he could not have a.n.a.lyzed. Her face was unchanged, there was not the varying of a line in the placid, healthy, thoughtful expression to indicate any deepening of her nature through suffering. Charlton's face had changed so that she would not have recognized him readily had it been less concealed. And by so much as his countenance had changed and hers remained fixed, had he drifted away from her. Albert felt this. However painful his emotion was, as he sat there casting furtive glances at Helen's face, there was no regret that all relation between them was broken forever. He was not sorry for the meeting. He needed such a meeting to measure the parallax of his progress and her stagnation. He needed this impression of Helen to obliterate the memory of the row-boat. She was no longer to remain in his mind a.s.sociated with the blessed memory of little Kate. Hereafter he could think of Katy in the row-boat--the other figure was a dim unreality which might have come to mean something, but which never did mean anything to him.

I wonder who keeps the tavern at Cypher's Lake now? In those old days it was not a very reputable place; it was said that many a man had there been fleeced at poker. The stage did not reach it on this snowy morning until ten o'clock. The driver stopped to water, the hospitable landlord, whose familiar nickname was "Bun," having provided a pail and cut a hole through the ice of the lake for the accommodation of the drivers. Water for beasts--gentlemen could meantime find something less "beastly" than ice-water in the little low-ceiled bar-room on the other side of the road. The deputy-marshal wanted to stretch his legs a little, and so, trusting partly to his knowledge of Charlton's character, partly to handcuffs, and partly to his convenient revolver, he leaped out of the coach and stepped to the door of the bar-room just to straighten his legs, you know, and get a gla.s.s of whisky "straight" at the same time. In getting into the coach again he chanced to throw back the buffalo-robe and thus exposed Charlton's handcuffs. Helen glanced at them, and then at Albert's face. She shivered a little, and grew red. There was no alternative but to ride thus face to face with Charlton for six miles.

She tried to feel herself an injured person, but something in the self-possessed face of Albert--his comforter had dropped down now--awed her, and she affected to be sick, leaning her head on her father's shoulder and surprising that gentleman beyond measure. Helen had never shown so much emotion of any sort in her life before, certainly never so much confusion and shame. And that in spite of her reasoning that it was not she but Albert who should be embarra.s.sed. But the two seemed to have changed places. Charlton was as cold and immovable as Helen Minorkey ever had been; she trembled and shuddered, even with her eyes shut, to think that his eyes were on her--looking her through and through--measuring all the petty meanness and shallowness of her soul. She complained of the cold and wrapped her blanket shawl about her face and pretended to be asleep, but the shameful nakedness of her spirit seemed not a whit less visible to the cool, indifferent eyes that she felt must be still looking at her from under the shadow of that cap-front. What a relief it was at last to get into the warm parlor of the hotel! But still she shivered when she thought of her ride.

It is one thing to go into a warm parlor of a hotel, to order your room, your fire, your dinner, your bed. It is quite another to drive up under the high, rough limestone outer wall of a prison--a wall on which moss and creeper refuse to grow--to be led handcuffed into a little office, to have your credentials for ten years of servitude presented to the warden, to have your name, age, nativity, hight, complexion, weight, and distinguishing marks carefully booked, to have your hair cropped to half the length of a prize-fighter's, to lay aside the dress which you have chosen and which seems half your individuality, and put on a suit of cheerless penitentiary uniform--to cease to be a man with a place among men, and to become simply a convict. This is not nearly so agreeable as living at the hotel. Did Helen Minorkey ever think of the difference?

There is little to be told of the life in the penitentiary. It is very uniform. To eat prison fare without even the decency of a knife or fork--you might kill a guard or a fellow-rogue with a fork--to sleep in a narrow, rough cell on a hard bed, to have your cell unlocked and to be marched out under guard in the morning, to go in a row of prisoners to wash your face, to go in a procession to a frugal breakfast served on tin plates in a dining-room mustier than a cellar, to be marched to your work, to be watched by a guard while you work, to know that the guard has a loaded revolver and is ready to draw it on slight provocation, to march to meals under awe of the revolver, to march to bed while the man with the revolver walks behind you, to be locked in and barred in and double-locked in again, to have a piece of candle that will burn two hours, to burn it out and lie down in the darkness--to go through one such day and know that you have to endure three thousand six hundred and fifty-two days like it--that is about all. The life of a blind horse in a treadmill is varied and cheerful in comparison.

Oh! yes, there is Sunday. I forgot the Sunday. On Sundays you don't have to work in the shops. You have the blessed privilege of sitting alone in your bare cell all the day, except the hour of service. You can think about the outside world and wish you were out. You can read, if you can get anything interesting to read. You can count your term over, think of a broken life, of the friends of other days who feel disgraced at mention of your name, get into the dumps, and cry a little if you feel like it.

Only crying doesn't seem to do much good. Such is the blessedness of the holy Sabbath in prison!

But Charlton did not let himself pine for liberty. He was busy with plans for reconstructing his life. What he would have had it, it could not be. You try to build a house, and it is shaken down about your ears by an earthquake. Your material is, much of it, broken. You can never make it what you would. But the brave heart, failing to do what it would, does what it can. Charlton, who had hated the law as a profession, was now enamored of it. He thought rightly that there is no calling that offers n.o.bler opportunities to a man who has a moral fiber able to bear the strain. When he should have finished his term, he would be thirty-one, and would be precluded from marriage by his disgrace. He could live on a crust, if necessary, and be the champion of the oppressed. What pleasure he would have in beating Conger some day! So he arranged to borrow law-books, and faithfully used his two hours of candle in studying. He calculated that in ten years--if he should survive ten years of life in a cell--he could lay a foundation for eminence in legal learning. Thus he made vinegar-barrels all day, and read c.o.ke on Littleton on Blackstone at night. His money received from the contractor for over-work, he used to buy law-books.

Sometimes he hoped for a pardon, but there was only one contingency that was likely to bring it about. And he could not wish for that. Unless, indeed, the prison-officers should seek a pardon for him. From the beginning they had held him in great favor. When he had been six months in prison, his character was so well established with the guards that no one ever thought of watching him or of inspecting his work.

He felt a great desire to have something done in a philanthropic way for the prisoners, but when the acting chaplain, Mr. White, preached to them, he always rebelled. Mr. White had been a steamboat captain, a sheriff, and divers other things, and was now a zealous missionary among the Stillwater lumbermen. The State could not afford to give more than three hundred dollars a year for religious and moral instruction at this time, and so the several pastors in the city served alternately, three months apiece. Mr. White was a man who delivered his exhortations with the same sort of vehemence that Captain White had used in giving orders to his deck-hands in a storm; he arrested souls much as Sheriff White had arrested criminals. To Albert's infidelity he gave no quarter. Charlton despised the chaplain's lack of learning until he came to admire his sincerity and wonder at his success. For the gracefulest and eruditest orator that ever held forth to genteelest congregation, could not have touched the prisoners by his highest flight of rhetoric as did the earnest, fiery Captain-Sheriff-Chaplain White, who moved aggressively on the wickedness of his felonious audience.

When Mr. White's three months had expired, there came another pastor, as different from him as possible. Mr. Lurton was as gentle as his predecessor had been boisterous. There was a strong substratum of manly courage and will, but the whole was overlaid with a sweetness wholly feminine and seraphic. His religion was the Twenty-third Psalm. His face showed no trace of conflict. He had accepted the creed which he had inherited without a question, and, finding in it abundant sources of happiness, of moral development, and spiritual consolation, he thence concluded it true. He had never doubted. It is a question whether his devout soul would not have found peace and edification in any set of opinions to which he had happened to be born. You have seen one or two such men in your life. Their presence is a benison. Albert felt more peaceful while Mr. Lurton stood without the grating of his cell, and Lurton seemed to leave a benediction behind him. He did not talk in pious cant, he did not display his piety, and he never addressed a sinner down an inclined plane. He was too humble for that. But the settled, the unruffled, the unruffleable peacefulness and trustfulness of his soul seemed to Charlton, whose life had been stormier within than without, nothing less than sublime. The inmates of the prison could not appreciate this delicate quality in the young minister. Lurton had never lived near enough to their life for them to understand him or for him to understand them. He considered them all, on general principles, as lost sinners, bad, like himself, by nature, who had superadded outward transgressions and the crime of rejecting Christ to their original guilt and corruption as members of the human family.

Charlton watched Lurton with intense interest, listened to all he had to say, responded to the influence of his fine quality, but found his own doubts yet unanswered and indeed untouched. The minister, on his part, took a lively interest in the remarkable young man, and often endeavored to remove his doubts by the well-knit logical arguments he had learned in the schools.

"Mr. Lurton," said Charlton impatiently one day, "were you ever troubled with doubt?"

"I do not remember that I ever seriously entertained a doubt in regard to religious truth in my life," said Lurton, after reflection.

"Then you know no more about my doubts than a blind man knows of your sense of sight." But after a pause, he added, laughing: "Nevertheless, I would give away my doubtativeness any day in exchange for your peacefulness." Charlton did not know, nor did Lurton, that the natures which have never been driven into the wilderness to be buffeted of the devil are not the deepest.

It was during Mr. Lurton's time as chaplain that Charlton began to receive presents of little ornamental articles, intended to make his cell more cheerful. These things were sent to him by the hands of the chaplain, and the latter was forbidden to tell the name of the giver.

Books and pictures, and even little pots with flowers in them, came to him in the early spring. He fancied they might come from some unknown friend, who had only heard of him through the chaplain, and he was p.r.o.ne to resent the charity. He received the articles with thankful lips, but asked in his heart, "Is it not enough to be a convict, without being pitied as such?" Why anybody in Stillwater should send him such things, he did not know. The gifts were not expensive, but every one gave evidence of a refined taste.

At last there came one--a simple cross, cut in paper, intended to be hung up as a transparency before the window--that in some unaccountable way suggested old a.s.sociations. Charlton had never seen anything of the kind, but he had the feeling of one who half-recognizes a handwriting. The pattern had a delicacy about it approaching to daintiness, an expression of taste and feeling which he seemed to have known, as when one sees a face that is familiar, but which one can not "place," as we say. Charlton could not place the memory excited by this transparency, but for a moment he felt sure that it must be from some one whom he knew. But who could there be near enough to him to send flower-pots and framed pictures without great expense? There was no one in Stillwater whom he had ever seen, unless indeed Helen Minorkey were there yet, and he had long since given up all expectation and all desire of receiving any attention at her hands. Besides, the a.s.sociations excited by the transparency, the taste evinced in making it, the sentiment which it expressed, were not of Helen Minorkey. It was on Thursday that he hung it against the light of his window. It was not until Sunday evening, as he lay listlessly watching his scanty allowance of daylight grow dimmer, that he became sure of the hand that he had detected in the workmanship of the piece. He got up quickly and looked at it more closely and said: "It must be Isa Marlay!"

And he lay down again, saying: "Well, it can never be quite dark in a man's life when he has one friend." And then, as the light grew more and more faint, he said: "Why did not I see it before? Good orthodox Isa wants to preach to me. She means to say that I should receive light through the cross."

And he lay awake far into the night, trying to divine how the flower-pots and pictures and all the rest could have been sent all the way from Metropolisville. It was not till long afterward that he discovered the alliance between Whisky Jim and Isabel, and how Jim had gotten a friend on the Stillwater route to help him get them through. But Charlton wrote Isa, and told her how he had detected her, and thanked her cordially, asking her why she concealed her hand. She replied kindly, but with little allusion to the gifts, and they came no more. When Isa had been discovered she could not bring herself to continue the presents. Save that now and then there came something from his mother, in which Isa's taste and skill were evident, he received nothing more from her, except an occasional friendly letter. He appreciated her delicacy too late, and regretted that he had written about the cross at all.

One Sunday, Mr. Lurton, going his round, found Charlton reading the New Testament.

"Mr. Lurton, what a sublime prayer the Pater-noster is!" exclaimed Charlton.

"Yes;" said Lurton, "it expresses so fully the only two feelings that can bring us to G.o.d--a sense of guilt and a sense of dependence."