The Deliverance Part 61

Then with the closing of the second winter his superb physical strength snapped suddenly like a cord that has stood too tight a strain, and for weeks he lingered between life and death in the hospital, into which he was carried while yet unconscious. With his returning health, when the abatement of the fever left him strangely shaken and the unearthly pallor still clung to his face and hands, he awoke for the first time to a knowledge that his illness had altered for the period of his convalescence, at least the vision through which he had grown to regard the world.

A change had come to him, in that mysterious borderland so near the grave, and the bare places in his soul had burst suddenly into fulfilment. Sitting one Sunday morning in the open court of the prison, with his thin white hands hanging between his knees and his head, cropped now of its thick, fair hair, raised to the suns.h.i.+ne, it seemed to him that, like Tucker on the old bench, he had learned at last how to be happy. The warm sun in his face, the blue sky straight overhead, the spouting fountain from which a sparrow drank, produced in him a recognition, wholly pa.s.sionless, of the abundant physical beauty of the earth--of a beauty in the blue sky and in the clear suns.h.i.+ne falling upon the prison court.

A month ago he had wondered almost hopefully if his was to be one of those pathetic sunken graves, marked for so brief a time by wooden headboards the graves of the men who had died within the walls--and now there pulsed through him, sitting there alone, a quiet satisfaction in the thought that he might still breathe the air and look into men's faces and see the blue sky overhead. The sky in itself! That was enough to fill one's memory to overflowing, Tucker had said.

A tall, lean convict, newly released from the hospital, crossed the court at a stumbling pace and stood for a moment at his side.

"I reckon you're hankerin', he remarked. "I was sent down here from the mountains, an' I hanker terrible for the sight of the old Humpback k.n.o.b."

"And I'd like to see a level sweep--hardly a hill, just a clean stretch for the wind to blow over the tobacco."

"You're from the tobaccy belt, then, ain't you? What are you here for?"

"Killing a man. And you?"

"Killin' two."

He limped off at his feeble step, and Christopher rubbed his hands in the warm suns.h.i.+ne and wondered how it would feel to bask on one of the old logs by the roadside.

That afternoon Jim Weatherby came to see him, bringing the news that Lila's baby had come and that she had named it Christopher.

"It's the living image of you, she says," he added, smiling; "but I confess I can't quite see it. The funny part is, you know, that Cynthia is just as crazy about it as Lila is, and she looks ten years younger since the little chap came."

"And Uncle Tucker?"

"His old wounds trouble him, but he sent you word he was waiting to go till you came back again."

A blur swam before Christopher's eyes, and he saw in fancy the old soldier waiting for him on the bench beside the damask rose-bush.

"And the others--and Maria Wyndham?" he asked, swallowing the lump in his throat.

Jim reached out and laid his hand on the broad stripes across the other's shoulder.

"She was with Mr. Tucker when he said that," he replied; "they are always together now; and she added; Tell him we shall wait together till he comes."

The tears which had blinded Christopher's eyes fell down upon his clasped hands.

"My G.o.d! Let me live to go back!" he cried out in his weakness.

>From this time the element of hope entered into his life, and like its shadow there came the brooding fear that he should not live to see the year of his release. With his declining health he had been given lighter work in the prison factory, but the small tasks seemed to him heavier than the large ones he remembered.

There was no disease, the physician in the hospital a.s.sured him; it was only his unusual form of homesickness feeding upon his weakened frame. Let him return once more to the outdoor life and the fresh air of the tobacco fields and within six months his old physical hardihood would revive.

It was noticeable at this time that the quiet tolerance which had grown upon him in his convalescence drew to him the sympathy which he had at first repulsed. The interest awakened in the beginning by some rare force of attraction in his mere bodily presence became now, when he had fallen away to what seemed the shadow of himself, a friendly and almost affectionate curiosity concerning his earlier history. With this there grew slowly a rough companions.h.i.+p between him and the men among whom he lived, and he found presently to his surprise that there was hardly one of them but had some soft spot in his character--some particular virtue which was still alive. The knowledge of good and evil thrust upon him in these months was not without effect in developing a certain largeness of outlook upon humanity--a kind of generous philosophy which remained with him afterward in the form of a peculiar mellowness of temperament.

The autumn of his third year was already closing when, being sent for one morning from the office of the superintendent, he went in to find Cynthia awaiting him with his pardon in her hand. "I've come for you, Christopher," she said, weeping at sight of his wasted figure. "The whole county has been working to get you out, and you are free at last."

"Free at last?" he repeated mechanically, and was conscious of a disappointment in the fact that he experienced no elation with the words. What was this freedom, that had meant so much to him a month ago?

"Somebody in Europe wrote back to Maria," she added, while her dry sobs rattled in her bosom, "that the boy had confessed it to a priest who made him write it home. Oh, Christopher!

Christopher! I can't understand!"

"No, you can't understand," returned Christopher, shaking his head. They would not understand, he knew, none of them--neither the world, nor Cynthia, nor his mother who was dead, nor Maria who was living. They would not understand, and even to himself the mystery was still unsolved. He had acted according to the law of his own nature; this was all that was clear to him; and the destiny of character had controlled him from the beginning. The wheel had turned and he with it, and being as blind as fate itself he could see nothing further.

Back once more in the familiar country, fresh from the strong grasp of friendly hands, and driving at sunset along the red road beneath half-bared honey-locusts, he was conscious, with a dull throb of regret, that the placid contentment he felt creeping over him failed in emotional resemblance to the happiness he had a.s.sociated with his return. Had the sap really gone dry within him, and would he go on forever with this curious numbness at his heart?

"Maria wanted you to go straight to the Hall," said Cynthia, turning suddenly, "but I told her I'd better take you home and put you to bed at once. It was she who went to the Governor and got your pardon," she added after a moment, "but when I begged her to come with me to take it to you she would not do it. She would not see you until you were back in your own place, she said."

He smiled faintly, and, leaning back among the rugs Cynthia had brought, watched the white mist creeping over the ploughed fields. The thought of Maria no longer stirred his pulses, and when presently they reached the whitewashed cottage, and he sat with Tucker before the wood fire in his mother's parlour, he found himself gazing with a dull impersonal curiosity at the portraits smiling so coldly down upon the hearth. The memory of his mother left him as immovable as did the many trivial a.s.sociations which thronged through his brain at sight of the room which had been hers. A little later, lying in her tester bed, the fall of the acorns on the s.h.i.+ngled roof above sent him into a profound and untroubled sleep.

With the first sunlight he awoke, and, noiselessly slipping into his clothes, went out for a daylight view of the country which had dwelt for so long a happy vision in his thoughts. The dew was thick on the gra.s.s, and, crossing to the old bench, he sat down in the pale suns.h.i.+ne beside the damask rosebush, on which a single flower blossomed out of season. Beyond the cedars in the graveyard the sunrise flamed golden upon a violet background, and across the field of lifeeverlasting there ran a sparkling path of fire. The air was strong with autumn scents, and as he drank it in with deep drafts it seemed to him that he began to breathe anew the spirit of life. With a single bound of the heart the sense of freedom came to him, and with it the happiness that he had missed the evening before pulsed through his veins. Much yet remained to him--the earth with its untold miracles, the sky with its infinity of s.p.a.ce, his own soul--and Maria!

With her name he sprang to his feet in the ardour of his impatience, and it was then that, looking up, he saw her coming to him across the sunbeams.