University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER NINTH.
RALPH AND THE CONTENTS OF THE BOX.

Do you see that vast structure, rising in the
moonlight and looking like a vast edifice of
snow? Do you behold the massive pillars
which support its marble roof? Is it not
beautiful — nay — is it not sublime? Around
it are scattered piles of timber and stone; the
framework over its windows — half shadowed
by the columns — shows that it is yet unfinished,
and still it towers into the cold blue sky,
filling the soul at once with grandeur and awe.

And do you see the outcast boy, who
stealthily climbs the broad staircase, leading
from the ground to the foot of its columns?
Beside that great pillar he is dwindled into a
very speck. You cannot appreciate the vastness
of these columns, until you see them contrasted
with a human being.

And the moon plays upon the marble roof,
and upon the marble flowers which wreathe

the summit of each column. And a silence
deeper than the grave reigns throughout the
marble mountain, with its rooms like vaults and
its passages like caverns.

Ralph enters the great door of the marble
edifice — the door which faces to the south.

A chill like death fastens on his veins. For
the place is colder than a subterranean vault.
He crosses the passage, from whose marble
floor a stairway ascends, and pauses in a moment
in the centre of a vaulted chamber.

The ceiling arches above his head. The
floor is marble beneath his feet. A silence,
whose very intensity appals him, encloses him
as a coffin encloses the dead. And through a
window, which is only half covered by unplaned
boards, trembles a broad ray from the
midnight moon.

And in the ray, upon the floor of Girard
College, kneels the Outcast Orphan who has
been made a thief by a Police Officer of the
great city, to which Girard bequeathed his
millions.

Hark! A footstep sounds without. Ralph
trembles, starts to his feet, looks around, and
kneels again.

“It's only my fancy,” he soliloquizes, “the
watchman's sound asleep in his box, and Girard
College is the last place where the 'spect
to find a fellow with a tin box at this time o'
night.”

The box is fastened by a small padlock,
dangling from the side. Ralph has no key, and
in fact is without the means to break the lock.
A lucky thought seizes him.

“This is Stewel's coat, and it 'ud be queer
if there wasn't nothin' like a knife in its
pockets.”

Plunging his hand into the capacious pockets
of the coat, Ralph presently drew forth a bunch
of keys, a jack-knife and a file. With the file
he forces the lock: the lid of the box opens at
his touch. Then quietly he empties the contents
of the box upon the marble floor.

Do you see him in the moonlight, with his
grey eyes growing larger every moment, and
his ruffian face stamped in every line with
dumb amazement?

Before him lie outspread the contents of the
box. Papers, bank notes, and gold in handsful.
Never a more delicious banquet was
spread upon a Banker's table.

Ralph was fairly frightened by this display
of Bank notes and gold.

“Wonder if they haint pennies arter all?”
he soliloquized, as he caught at a handful of
the glittering pile, and suffered it to glide between
his fingers. “Gold, rale gold — why,
there must be a thousand dollars here!”

A thousand dollars was the utmost limit of
Ralph's idea of immense wealth. With a
thousand dollars he imagined a man might buy
the State House and the United States Bank
together.

“What shill I do with it? Where shill I
put it? Cuss it, but I'm in a purty scrape!”

Ralph rose and paced the floor; every step
was answered by an echo, which growled
through the vast building like distant thunder.

Ralph, scratching his tangled locks and
“cracking” his fingers, wandered up and down
— alone — while the golden pile shone brightly
on the floor.

“I have it, I have it,” he cried at last, “there
is many a dark corner under the marble roof,
in the cock-loft of this college. I'll fix the
business in five minutes, or my name's not
Jonesey.”

He gathered up the gold. Not a single piece
was forgotten. He gathered up the parchment
and bank notes. He placed gold and parchments
and bank notes within the tin box again.
Then crossing the vaulted hall, he entered
another hall as vacant and gloomy, with a tiny
thread of moonlight playing through its darkness.
This hall was soon traversed. Ralph
stood in the passage, or corridor, on the northern
end of the building, at the foot of the
stairway which, suspended — as it seemed —
in air, led to the upper chamber, and to the roof
of the College. This slight staircase, built of
marble, was covered with rough boards. Ralph
clutched the tin box, and hurried upward. It
was very dark. A single misplaced step, and
he would have been dashed to pieces. At last
he reached the topmost step, and stood upon
the marble floor in the story of the College immediately
beneath the roof.

“Dark as the very mischief; but somewhere
here there's a wooden stairs, which hangs on
the end o' th' college like a martin box.'

He found the temporary stairway after much
difficulty, and ascended the creaking steps. He
was in utter darkness. His mind became confused;

he was afraid, and would have retraced
his steps, had he known which way to tread.

He reached forth his hand, and it encountered
one of those massive piles of brick which support
(or seem to support) the immense roof
of the College.

And there, in one of those nooks which at
noonday are dark as midnight, he placed the
Tin Box, covering it with a mass of loose sand,
dry mortar, and other rubbish which overspread
the solid floor.

“That's done. Now I'll make tracks for
home, and have a talk with Fanny. Somehow
or 'nother, Fanny has idees which I can never
get hold of.”

But how should he retrace his steps in the
thick darkness?

While searching for the wooden stairway by
which he ascended, he was attracted by a dim
light, shining only a few paces beyond him.

“The stairs that lead to the roof of the College,”
exclaimed Ralph; “b'lieve I'll go up
and take a look at the moonlight.”

Up the narrow stairs, between the huge walls,
or masses of brick and mortar, which touched
him on either side, he ascended. It was not
long before he stood upon that pavement of
marble blocks, which forms the roof of the
College. That roof, covered with snow, was
darkened suddenly by a long belt of blackness
— the shadow of Ralph the Outcast, standing
under the canopy of Heaven, on the summit
of the marble pile.

The sight which met his eyes for some moments
held him dumb. The Great City, a
wilderness of roofs, white with snow, extending
far away in the clear cold light of the wintry
moon!

On the east, the broad Delaware shone with
a tremulous lustre on every wave; on the west
the mound of Fairmount, clothed in a mantle
of snow, rose boldly into the cloudless air.
Steeples, roofs, towers, on the one hand, and on
the other, the country side, whose woods and
fields and farm houses looked pure and beautiful
in their garment of spotless white. The
hills of Jersey, a bleak uneven line, broke abruptly
into the eastern sky, while to the west
extended a vague prospect of villages amid
woods, of mansions on the verge of tranquil
waves, and in the far distance rose a glimpse
of the hills of Brandywine.

Philadelphia was beneath the feet of the
Outcast Boy. Embraced by her rivers — the
Delaware, flashing broad and deep; the Schuylkill,
gleaming like a silver thread — she slept
beneath her countless roofs, a vast wilderness
of wealth and misery, with the eyes of one of
her ten thousand Heathen surveying her every
feature by the rays of a cloudless moon.

Oh, you may talk of the savage grandeur of
the desert, untrodden by the foot of man, of
the awful solitude which invests the traveller,
who looks upon the world from the topmost
peak of Chimborazo; but here, beneath your
feet, is a desert, a solitude, whose desolation
and whose loneliness are made up — not of
rocks and stones — but of the misery of human
hearts, scourged and lacerated by the fangs of
a barbarous Civilization.

Look at Philadelphia, as she sleeps beneath
the moon, snow upon every roof — is she not
pure and beautiful in her white robes?

The outside of the Sepulchre!

Without a garment of stainless purity —
within `rottenness and dead men's bones!'

Pierce their countless roofs; dive into the
caverns, which spread beneath that mantle
which looks white as an angel's wing; descend
into the Sepulchre — What then?

Look at Ralph the Outcast, as he stands
upon the roof of Girard College. Yonder in
the Penitentiary, which rises to your right —
a Bastile that intervenes between your sight
and the white ground of Fairmount — there are
hundreds of convicts, who one day were
Ralphs, and who now, having ripened from
friendless childhood into felon manhood, are
counting the slow moments of the night, by
the irregular beatings of their hearts.

Shall this young Ralph, ever ripen into the
Dead Sea fruit of the Penitentiary?

The young ruffian in his uncouth dress,
raised his large eyes to the sky, and saw the
moon shining there above, with a single star
not far away, and then a chaos of half formed
thoughts began to break in waves, upon the
beach of his barren soul.

Was there a God? Did HE love the Rich
better than the Poor? Does HE care for me,
poor outcast that I am — outcast baptized in
want and hardship, and about to be admitted
into full Communion with the terrible church
of crime?

Thoughts like these—of course not expressed
in these words—came half muttered
from the lips of Ralph as he stood alone on
the roof of Girard College.

“I'll go home to Bonus Court, and take advice
of Fanny,” said Ralph.

Clad in his white coat, he descended from the
College, left the grounds, and after passing along
Franklin Avenue, for a half a mile, entered
a southern street, which led toward Bonus
Court.

At the entrance of Bonus Court he stood at
last. The darkness of that den, was only
broken by a faint ray. A light glimmered
from the window of the lower room. Ralph
hesitated.

“Wonder if mother's dead?” he said as he
entered the Court—“Rayther think Fanny 'll
be surprised when she hears I'm so rich.
Did'nt I do that Stewel Pydgeon—G-e-t
o-u-t! Charles Augustus Millikin you're a
precious cuss, you are.”

Ralph laughed to himself as he looked
through the window, into the room occupied
by John Cattermill the Drunkard.

While Ralph hesitates before the window,
let us return for a few moments to the summit
of Girard College. Let us place the young
outcast once more upon the marble roof, and
listen to a Sermon preached by “a writer of
immoral books.” You, that wish to pursue
only the plot of this narrative, may skip the
ensuing chapter. But you that wish to hear
a Sermon, with Girard College for a pulpit,
will do well to read the words which follow.