 | CHAPTER XXX.
THE PENITENTIARY. The mystery of Metropolisville |  |
30. CHAPTER XXX.
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
passengers. 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 passengers. The Fuller House was
the last call of all.
“Haven't you a back-seat?” The passenger 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
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-muffled passenger, responsible for nothing,
not even for your own neck, is thoroughly delightful—provided
always that you are not the passenger in handcuffs going to
prison for ten years. To the passenger 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 passenger 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,
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 pesentment, 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 dispassionate observer.
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 analyzed. 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
impression of Helen to obliterate the memory of the row-boat.
She was no longer to remain in his mind associated 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 glass 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
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 embarrassed. 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 nobler 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
preeluded 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 Coke 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,
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 cruditest 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
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 unruffileable
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
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 prone 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 associations. 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
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 associations 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
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 God—a sense of guilt and a sense
of dependence.”
“What I admired in the prayer was not that, but the unselfishness
that puts God and the world first, and asks bread,
forgiveness, and guidance last. It seems to me, Mr. Lurton,
that all men are not brought to God by the same feelings.
Don't you think that a man may be drawn toward God by
self-sacrifice—that a brave, heroic act, in its very nature, brings
us nearer to God? It seems to me that whatever the rule may
be, there are exceptions; that God draws some men to Himself
by a sense of sympathy; that He makes a sudden draft on their
moral nature—not more than they can bear, but all they can
bear—and that in doing right under difficulties the soul finds
itself directed toward God—opened on the side on which
God sits.”
Mr. Lurton shook his head, and protested, in his gentle and
earnest way, against this doctrine of man's ability to do anything
good before conversion.
“But, Mr. Lurton,” urged Albert, “I have known a man to
make a great sacrifice, and to find himself drawn by that very
sacrifice into a great admiring of Christ's sacrifice, into a great
desire to call God his father, and into a seeking for the forgiveness
God. Did you never know such a case?”
“Never. I do not think that genuine conversions come in
that way. A sense of righteousness can not prepare a man for
salvation—only a sense of sin—a believing that all our righteousness
is filthy rags. Still, I wouldn't discourage you from studying
the Bible in any way. You will come round right after a
while, and then you will find that to be saved, a man must
abhor every so-called good thing that he ever did.”
“Yes,” said Charlton, who had grown more modest in his
trials, “I am sure there is some truth in the old doctrine as
you state it. But is not a man better and more open to
divine grace, for resisting a temptation to vice?”
Mr. Lurton hesitated. He remembered that he had read, in
very sound writers, arguments to prove that there could be no
such thing as good works before conversion, and Mr. Lurton
was too humble to set his judgment against the great doctors'.
Besides, he was not sure that Albert's questions might not
force him into that dangerous heresy attributed to Arminius,
that good works may be the impulsive cause by which God is
moved to give His grace to the unconverted.
“Do you think that a man can really do good without
God's help?” asked Mr. Lurton.
“I don't think man ever tries to do right in humility and
sincerity without some help from God,” answered Albert, whose
mode of thinking about God was fast changing for the better.
“I think God goes out a long, long way to meet the first
motions of a good purpose in a man's heart. The parable of
the Prodigal Son only half-tells it. The parable breaks down
with a truth too great for human analogies. I don't know but
to be a Calvinist—in fact, on some points, I out-Calvin Calvin.
Is not God's help in the good purposes of every man?”
Mr. Lurton shook his head with a gentle gravity, and changed
the subject by saying, “I am going to Metropolisville next week
to attend a meeting. Can I do anything for you?”
“Go and see my mother,” said Charlton, with emotion.
“She is sick, and will never get well, I fear. Tell her I am
cheerful. And—Mr. Lurton—do you pray with her. I do not
believe anything, except by fits and starts; but one of your
prayers would do my mother good. If she could be half as
peaceful as you are, I should be happy.”
Lurton walked away down the gallery from Albert's
cell, and descended the steps that led to the dining-room, and
was let out of the locked and barred door into the vestibule,
and out of that into the yard, and thence out through other
locks into the free air of out-doors. Then he took a long
breath, for the sight of prison doors and locks and bars and
grates and gates and guards oppressed even his peaceful soul.
And walking along the sandy road that led by the margin of
Lake St. Croix toward the town, he recalled Charlton's last
remark. And as he meditatively tossed out of the path with
his boot the pieces of pine-bark which in this lumbering country
lie about everywhere, he rejoiced that Charlton had learned
to appreciate the value of Christian peace, and he offered a
silent prayer that Albert might one day obtain the same serenity
as himself. For nothing was further from the young minister's
mind than the thought that any of his good qualities were
natural. He considered himself a miracle of grace upon all
sides. As if natural qualities were not also of God's grace!
| CHAPTER XXX.
THE PENITENTIARY. The mystery of Metropolisville | |