Chapter VIII: Canto XXV (2)

She was talking to herself. Jem whistled, pretending not to hear; but he peered sharply into her face, with the relish which all sickly, premature children have for a mystery or pain. Very seldom was there hint of either about Martha Yarrow. She was an Ohio woman, small-boned, muscular, with healthy, quick blood, not a scrofulous, ill-tempered drop in her veins; in her brain only a very few and obstinate opinions, maybe, but all of them lying open to the sight of anybody who cared to know them. Not long ago, she had been a pretty, bouncing country-belle; now, she was a hard-working housewife: a Whig, because all the Clarks (her own family) were Whigs: going to the Baptist church, with no clear ideas about close communion or immersion, because she had married a country-parson. With a consciousness that she had borne a heavier pain in her life than most women, and ought to feel scourged and sad, she did cry out with such feeling sometimes,--but with a keen, natural relish for apple-butter parings, or fair-days, or a neighbor dropping in to tea, or anything that would give the children and herself a chance to joke and laugh, and be like other people again. Between the two feelings, her temper was odd and uncertain enough. But in this December air, now, her still rounded cheek grew red, her breast heaved, her eyes sparkled, glad as a child would be, simply because it was cold and Christmas was coming; while the child Jem, with his tougher, less sappy animal nature, jogged gravely beside her, head and eyes down. As for her every-day life, nobody's fires burned, nobody's windows shone like Martha Yarrow's; not a pound of butter went to market with the creamy, clovery taste her fingers worked into hers. She put a flavor, an elastic spring, into every bit of work she did, making it play. The very nervousness of the woman, her sudden fits of laughter and tears, impressed you as the effervescence of a zest of life which began at her birth. Nobody ever got to the end, or expected to get to the end, of her stories and scraps of old songs. Then, every day some new plan, keeping the whole house awake and alive: when Tom's birthday came, a surprise-feast of raspberries and cake; when Jem's new trousers were produced, they had been made up over-night, a dead secret, ten shining dimes in the pocket, fresh from the mint; even the penny string of blue beads for Catty, bought of Sims the peddler, was hid under her plate, and made quite a jollification of that supper. You may be sure, the five years just gone in that house had been short and merry and cozy enough for the children. Before that--Here Jem's memory flagged: he had been a baby then; Catty just born; yet, somehow, he never thought of that unknown time without the furtive, keen glance into his mother's face, and a frightened choking in the heart under his puny chest. Somewhere, back yonder, or in the years coming, some vague horror waited for him to fight. To-night, (always at Christmas, although then the glow and comfort of all days reached its heat,) this unaccountable dread was on the boy; why, he never knew. It might be that under the hurry and preparation of Martha Yarrow on that day some deeper meaning did lie, which his instinct had discerned: more probably, however, it was but the sickly vagary of a child grown old too fast.

They hurried along the path now to reach the house and shut the night outside, for every moment the cold and dark were growing heavier; the snow rasping under their feet, as its crust cracked; overhead, the sky-air frozen thin and gray, holding dead a low, watery half-moon; now and then a more earthy, thicker gust breaking sharply round the hill, taking their breath. It was only a step, however, and Tom was holding the house-door open, letting a ruddy light stream out, and with it a savory smell of supper. Tom halloed, and that blue-eyed pudge of a Catty pounded on the window with her fat little fist. How hot the fire glowed! Somehow all Christmas seemed waiting in there. It was time to hurry along. Even Ready came out, shaking his shaggy old sides impatiently in the snow, and began to dog them, snapping at Jem's heels. Like most old people, he liked his ease, and was apt to be out of sorts, if meals were kept waiting. Ready's whims always made Martha laugh as she did when she was a young girl: they knew each other then, long before Jem was born.

"Come on, old Truepenny," she said, going in.

There _was_ comfort. Nothing in that house, from the red woollen curtains to the bright poker, which did not have its part to play for Christmas. Nothing that did not say "Christmas," from Catty's eyes to the very supper-table. Of course, I don't mean the Christmas dinner, when I say supper. Tom could have told you. Somewhere in his paunchy little body he kept a perpetual bill of fare, checked off or unchecked. He based and stayed his mind now on preparations in the pantry. Something solid there! A haunch of venison, mince-meat, winter succotash, a roasted peahen,--and that is the top and crown of Nature's efforts in the way of fowls. For suppers,--pish! However, Tom ate with the rest. Mother was hungry; so they were very leisurely, and joked and laughed to that extent that even Catty was uproarious when they were through. Then Jem fell to work at the great coals, and battered them into a rousing fire.

"I'll go and fasten the shutters," said Tom.

Martha Yarrow's back was to the window. She turned sharply. The sickly white moon lighted up the snow-waste out there; some one might be out in those frozen fields,--some one who was coming home,--who had been gone for years,--years. Jem was watching her.

"Leave the windows alone, Tom," he said. "It won't hurt the night to see my fire."

He pulled his cricket close up to her, and took her hand to pet. It was cold, and her teeth chattered. However, they were all so snug and close together, and Christmas, that great warm-hearted day, was so near upon them, as full of love and hearty, warm enjoyment as the living God could send it, that its breath filled all their hearts; and presently Martha Yarrow's face was brighter than Catty's. They were noisy and busy enough. The programme for to-morrow was to make out; that put all heads to work to plan: the stockings to be opened, and dinner, and maybe a visit to the menagerie in the afternoon. That was Martha's surprise, and she was not disappointed in the applause it brought. It made the tears come to her eyes, an hour after, when she was going to bed, remembering it.

"It takes such a little thing to make them happy," she said to herself,--"or me, either," with a somewhat silly face.

She tried to thank God for giving them so much, but only sobbed. After the confusion about the show was over, and Catty had been wakened into a vague jungle of tigers and lions and Shetland ponies, and put to sleep again, they subsided enough to remember the winding-up of the day. Quiet that was to be; the children from Shag's Point were coming up, some half-dozen in all, for their share of Christmas. Poorer than the Yarrows, you understand? though but a little; in fact, there were not many steps farther down: peahens and cranberries were not for every day. Well, to-morrow evening Jem would tell them the story of the Stable and the Child, and how that the Child was with us yet, if we could only see. Jem was always his mother's spokesman, and put the meaning of Christmas into words: she never talked of such things. Yet they always watched her face, when they spoke of them,--watched it now, and looked, as she did, into the little room beyond the kitchen where they sat, their eyes growing still and brighter. There might have been a tinge of the savage or the Frenchman in Martha Yarrow's nature, she had so strong a propensity to make real, apparent to the senses, what few ideas she had, even her religion. A good skill to do it, too. The recess out of the kitchen was only a small closet, but, with the aid of a softly tinted curtain or two, and the nebulous light of a concealed lamp, she had contrived to give it an air of distance and reserve. Within were green wreaths hung over the whitewashed walls, and an altar-shaped little white table, covered with heaps of crimson leaves and bright berries, such as grow in the snow; only a few flowers, but enough to fill the air with fragrance; the children's Christmas gifts, and wax-lights burning before a picture, the child Jesus, looking down on them with a smile as glad as their own. A thoroughly real person to the boys, this Christ for childhood; for she built the little altar before this picture on all their holidays: something in the woman herself needing the story of the Stable and the Child. If she were doing a healthier work on the souls of that morbid Jem and glutton Tom than could a thousand after-sermons, she did not know it: never guessed, either, when they absorbed day by day hardly enough the force of her tough-muscled endurance and wholesome laugh, that she prepared the way of the Lord and made His paths straight. Yet what matter who knew?

But to go on with our story. There were times--once or twice to-night, for instance--when she ceased doing even her unconscious work. Assuredly, somewhere back in her life, something had gone amiss with this silly, helpful creature, and left a taint on her brain. The hearty, pretty smile would go suddenly from her face, something foreign looking out of it, instead, as if a pestilent thought had got into her soul; she would rise uneasily, going to the window, looking out, her forehead leaning on the glass, her body twitching weakly. One would think from her face she saw some work in the world which God had forgotten. What could it matter to her? Whatever hurt her, it was the one word which her garrulous lips never hinted. Once to-night she spoke more plainly than Jem had ever known her to do in all his life. It was after the children had gone to bed, which they did, shouting and singing, and playing circus-riders over the pillows, their mother leaning her elbows on the foot-board, laughing, in the mean time. Jem got up, after the others were asleep, and stole after her, in his little flannel drawers, back to the kitchen. By the window again, as he had feared, the woollen sock which she was knitting for Tom in her hand, the yarn all tangled and broken. Ready was by her knees, winking sleepily. The old dog was growing surly with his years, as we said: Jem remembered when he used to romp and tussle with him, but that was long ago: he lay in the chimney-corner always now, growling at Martha herself even, if her singing or laugh disturbed his nap. But when these strange moods came on her, Jem noticed that the yellow old beast seemed conscious of it sooner than any one beside, crept up to her, stood by her: that she clung to him, not to her children. He was licking her hand now, his red eye, drowsy though it was, watching her as if danger were nigh. A dog you would not slight. Inside of his hot-headedness and courage there was that reserved look in his eyes, which some men and brutes have, that says they have a life of their own to live separate from yours, and they know it. The boy crept up jealously, thrust his numb fingers into his mother's hand. She started, looking down.

"It grows into a clear winter's night, Jemmy," trying to speak carelessly.

So they stood looking out together. The fire had burned down into a great bed of flameless coals, the kitchen glowed warm and red, throwing out even a patch of ruddy light on the snow-covered yard without. A cold, but comfortable home-look out there: the bit of garden, fences, cow-house, pump, heaped with the snow; old Dolly asleep in her stable: Jem wrapped himself in his mother's skirt with a sudden relish of warm snugness. What made her pull at Ready's neck with such nervous jerks? She saw nothing beyond? Jem stood on tiptoe, peering out. There was no hint of the hailstorm they had prophesied, in the night: the moon stood lower now in the sky, filling the air with a yellow, frosty brilliance. Yet something strangely cold, dead, unfamiliar, in the night yonder, chilled him. Neither sound nor motion there; hills, river, and fields, distinct, sharply cut in pallor, but ghost-like: it made him afraid. There seemed to be no end of them; the hills to the north ran low, and beyond them he could see more blue and cold and distance, going on--who could tell where? to the eternal ice and snow, it might be. She felt it, he knew. The boy was frightened, tried to pull her back to the fire, when something he saw outside made him stop suddenly. Shag's Hill, the nearest of the ledge to the house, is a low, narrow cone, with a sharp rim against the sky; the moon had sunk half behind it, lighting the surface of drifted snow which faced them. Across this there suddenly fell a long, uncertain shadow, which belonged neither to bush nor tree: it might be the flicker of a cloud; or a man, passing across the top of the hill, would make it. It was nothing; some of the coal-diggers from the Point going home; he pulled at her petticoat again.

"Come to the fire, dear," he said, looking up.

Her whole face and neck were hot; she laughed and trembled as if some spasm were upon her.

"Do you see?" she cried, trying to force the window open. "Oh, Jemmy, it might be! it might!"

Jem was used to his mother's unaccountable whims of mood. Ready, however, startled him. The dog pricked up his ears, sniffed the air once or twice, then, after a grave pause of a minute, with a sharp howl, such as Jem had not heard him give for years, dashed through the kitchen into the wash-shed and out across the fields. Martha Yarrow turned away from the window, and leaned her head against the dresser-shelves: standing quite still, only that she clutched Jem's hand. The clock ticked noisily as a half-hour went by; the fire burned lower and dark. The dog came back at last, dragging his feet heavily, came up close to her, and crouched down with a half human moan. After a long time he got up, went out into the wash-kitchen in a spiritless way, and did not return again that night. She did not move. It seemed a long time to the child before she turned, her face wet with tears, and took him up in her arms, chafing his cold feet.

"It could not be! I knew that, Jemmy. I wasn't a fool. But I thought--Oh, Pet, I've waited such a long while!"

He patted her cheeks, soothing her,--the more effectually, perhaps, that he did not know what troubled her.

"Why, it's Christmas, mother," he said.

"I know that. You see, I thought," her eyes fastened on his in an appealing sort of way, "that, being Christmas, if there should be any lost body wandering out on the fields that God had forgotten--What then?" all the blood gone from her face. "Why, what then, Jem? No home, no one to say to him, 'Here's home, here's wife and children a-waiting to love you,--oh, sick with waiting to love you!' No one to say that, Jem. And him wandering out in the cold, going quick back to the mouth of hell, not knowing how God loved him."

"If there is such a one," Jem said, steadily, though his lip trembled, "God will let him know."

"There is no such one," sharply. "There is no one yonder but knows his home, and is nearer to his God than you or I, James Yarrow."

The boy made no reply,--sat on her knees looking earnestly into the fire. He had more nearly guessed her secret than she knew,--near enough to know how to comfort her. After a while, when she was quiet, he turned, and put his thin arms about her neck, smiling.

"Take me into your bed, mother, I'm so cold! Let me into old Catty's place this once."

She nodded, pleased, and, putting him to bed, soon followed him. When she held him snugly in her arms, the replenished fire making hot, flickering shadows from the next room, he whispered,--

"Next Christmas, mother! Only one year more!"

Again the quick shiver of her body; but this time her breath was gentle, a soft light in her eyes.

"Well, and then, my son?"

"Why, some one else then will call me son. How long he has been gone, dear! so long that I never saw him since I was a bit of a baby."

"Five years. Yes. Well, dear?" anxiously.

Her eyes were shut, he stroked the lids softly, thinking how moist and red her lips were: never as beautiful a face as the little mother's; for so Jem, feeling quite grown up in his heart, called her there.

"Well, then, no more trouble, but somebody to take care of us all the time. Whenever I see a preacher, now, I think of father"--stopping abruptly, with that anxious, incisive look so sad to see on a child's face.

She did not reply at first; then,--

"He preached God's word as he knew it," she said, dryly.

"And whenever I hear of a good, brave man, I think, 'That's like father!'"

Her eyes opened now.

"That's true, Jemmy! God knows that's true! So proud my boy will be of his father!"

She did not say anything more, but began playing with his hair, her month unsteady, and a bashful, dreamy smile in her eyes. She looked very young and girlish in the mellow light.

"He's not coarse like me, Jem," she said at last. "Even more like a woman in some ways. He always came nearer to you children, for instance; I mind how you always used to creep away from me close to him at night. He hates noise, Stephen does,--and mean, scraping ways, such as we're used to, being poor. My boy'll mind that? We'll keep anything shabby out of his sight, when he comes back."

"I'll mind," said Jem, dryly. "But--Well, no matter. We're to try and be like him, Tom and I? I understand."

She drew down her head suddenly into the pillow. Jem had been growing sleepy, but he started wide awake now, trying to see her face: the pretty pink color his questions had brought was gone from it.

"Did you speak, mother?"

No answer.

"I said we are to be men like him, Tom and I, if we can?"

He knew he had touched her to the quick somehow: his heart beat thick with the old childish terror, as he waited for her answer.

"Yes, you are to try, my son."

Martha Yarrow's frivolous chirruping voice was altered, with meaning in it he never had heard before, as if her answer came out of some depth where God had faced her soul, and forced it to speak truth. But when, after that, the boy, curious to know more, went on with his questions, she quieted him gravely, kissed him good-night, and turned over,--to sleep, he concluded, from her regular breathing. However, when Jem, after a while, began to snore, she got up and went to the kitchen-fire, kneeling down on the stone hearth: her head was on fire, and her body cold.

"So they _shall_ be like him!" she whispered, with a fierce, baited look, as if by her wife's trust in him she defied the whole world. "I have kept my word. I've tried to make his sons what God made him in the beginning."

That was true: she had kept her word. Five years ago, when the great scandal came on the church in ----, and their minister was tried for forgery, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment in the penitentiary, the first letter his wife wrote to him there had these words: "For the boys, my husband, they never shall know of this thing. They shall know you as God and I do, Stephen. I'll make them men like you, if I can: except in your religion; for I believe, before God, the Devil taught you that."

When the man read that in his cell, a dry, quiet smile came over his face. He had not expected such a keen opinion from his shallow, easy-going wife: he did not think there was so much insight in her.

"It's a deep sounding you give, Martha, true or not," folding up the letter. "And so the boys will never know?" going back to his solitary cobbling, for they were making a shoemaker of him.

If there were any remorse under his quiet, or impatience at fate, or gnawing homesickness, he did not show it. That was the last letter or message that came from his wife. The friends of other prisoners were admitted to visit them, but no one ever asked to see him; the five years went by; every day the same bar of sunlight struck across his bench, and glittered on the point of his awl, gray in winter, yellow in summer; but no day brought a word or a sign from the outer world but that. The man grew thin, mere skin and bone; but then he was scrofulous. He asked no questions, ceased at last to look up, when the jailer brought his meals, to see if he carried a letter. Sometimes, when he used to stand chafing his stubbly chin in the evening at the slit cut in the stones for his window, looking at the red brick chimney-pot he could see over the penitentiary-wall, it seemed like something of outer life, and he would mutter, "She said the boys would never know." Once, too, a year or two after that, when the jailer came into "quiet Stevy's" cell, (for so he nicknamed him,) Yarrow came up, and took him by the coat-buttons, looking up and gabbling something about Martha and the little chaps in a maudlin sort of way,--then, with a silly laugh, lay down on his pallet.

"I never felt sorry for the little whiffet before," said the fat jailer, when he came out. "He's so close; but it's a cursed shame in his people to give him the go-by that way,--there!"

But when he went back an hour or two after, he found he had gained no ground with Stevy; he was dry, silent as ever: he had come to himself, meanwhile, and shivered with disgust at the fear that any madness had made him commit himself to this mass of flesh.

"'Mortised with the sacred garlic,'" he muttered, with the usual dry twinkle in his eyes.

Ben caught the last word.

"It's a good yarb, garlic," he said, confusedly. "Uses it on hot coals mostly, under broilin' steaks. Well, good night.--He's a queer chap, though," after he had gone out,--"beyond me."

Five years being gone, Martha Yarrow, sitting by her fire to-night, could only repeat the words of her letter. She had taken out a daguerreotype of her husband, and was looking at it. He was a small man; young; dressed in a suit of rusty black, with a certain subdued, credulous, incomplete air about him, like a man forced at birth into some iron mould of circumstance, and whose own proper muscles and soul had never had a chance of air to grow. A homely, saddened, uncouthly shaped face,--one that would be sure to go snubbed and unread through the world, to find at last some woman who would know its latent meaning, and worship it with the heat of passion which this country-girl had given. Withal, a cheerful, quizzical smile on the lips. Poor Martha's eyes filled, the moment she looked at that; and so she went back to her first years of married life, full of keen, relishing enjoyment, all coming from him, quiet, silent as he was,--remembering how her maddest freaks were indulged with that same odd, dry laugh. She stood alone now.

"And in these years I have grown used to being alone,"--standing up, stretching her arms suddenly above her head, and letting them fall again.

It was a lie: she knew that the tired sinking within her of body and soul was harder to bear now than the day he went away, and she weaker to bear it. If she could but lean her head on his breast for one moment, and feel him pat her hair with the old "Tut! tut! why, what ails my girl?" it would give her more strength than all her prayers. She couldn't think of herself as anything but a girl, when she remembered her husband: these years were nothing.

Her mouth grew drier and hotter, as she sat there looking into the face, polishing the glass with her hand, kissing it. "I'm so tired, Stephen!" she would whisper now and then. Only those who know the unuttered mysterious bond in the soul of a true wife and husband can comprehend what Martha Yarrow bore, when it was torn apart, and by no fault of hers. "God meant him for me," she sometimes said, savagely; "no man had a right to part us." She looked at the picture, feeling that he was purer than any baby she had nursed at her breast, nearer God. "It was his religion was to blame. That was the ruin of us all. I believe he never knew who the good God was; how could he?" thinking of his father, who used to sit in the chimney-corner,--one of those acrid doctrine-professors who sour the water of life into gall and vinegar before they dole it out to their children. She was glad she had told him her mind before they parted,--to what his teaching had brought his son. "I cut deep that day, and I thank God for it," she said, her face white.

She had brought the children here to be near the penitentiary, but she had never been allowed to see him. No letters came from him. His brother, John Yarrow, sent hers to him. There was some formula of admission, he said, which she did not understand. The time was nearly up; in one year more he would be free. Well, and then? He had been in one of the ways that butted down on hell; how would he come back to her? In all these years, silence. Who would bring him back? Who? They were keen enough to put him in,--but who would stay with him, to say, "You've slipped, boy, but stand up again"? Who would hold out a kind hand at the gate, when he came out, with "Here's a place, Yarrow. Here's home, and love, and God waiting; try another chance"? Who would do that? No wonder she looked out that night, thinking there was some work forgotten.

Martha sat there until dawn came, moving only to replenish the fire lest the children should take cold. In all her life she never forgot that night. Some furious instinct seemed at work within her, goading her to be up and doing. What should she do? Why should she disquiet herself? Her husband was safe asleep in his cell. Yet all night long she could not keep her soul back from crying to God to save him in his deadly peril, to bring him there at once to her, to the children. When morning broke, cold and sweet-breathed, russet clouds, dyed with the latent crimson day, thronging up from behind the hills, she tried to thrust down all the pains of the night as moody fancies. They did not go. She bathed herself, woke the children, laughed and romped with them (for their year's holiday should not be damped); but the cold, unsufferable weight within dragged her physically down. Trifles without, too, beset her with vague fears. Ready was gone; for years he had not left the house at night. The children began to look with uneasy eyes at her face: she would betray all. She kept her fingers thrust in the breast of her wrapper to touch the case of the picture: she could hold herself quiet so. How cold and unmeaning the light was that day to her! and every tick of the clock seemed to beat straight on her brain. So the morning crept by. She grew so sure--without reason--that it was the last day of waiting, that, when the children went out to build their snow-man, she sat down on Jem's chest, shivering and dizzy; when the snow cracked under a step outside, afraid to turn her head,--thinking he would be standing in the door, with the old patient smile on his mouth, and his hand out. But he did not come.

* * * * *

About half a mile on the other side of Shag's Hill there is a hotel, off from the road, looking like an overgrown Swiss _châlet_. Not a country-tavern by any means. Starr, a New-York caterer, keeps it, as a sort of boarding-house for a few wealthy Pittsburg families in summer: however, if you should stop there at any time of the year, you would be sure of a delicate _croquette_ and a fair glass of wine. Usually, Starr and his family are the only occupants in winter, but on this Christmas eve there were lights in two of the upper rooms. M. Soulé, the Mobile financier, so well known through the West, with his family, had occupied them for about a week; this evening, too, a Mr. Frazier from St. Louis was at the house: there was a collision of trains near Beaver, and he had left the other passengers and come over to Starr's, intending to go on horseback up to Pittsburg in the morning. An old acquaintance of the Soulés, apparently: he had dined with them that evening, and when Starr went up about ten o'clock to know if Mr. Soulé wished to go out gunning in the morning, he found the old man still standing with his back to the fire, talking sharply of the Little Miami Railroad shares, then beginning to go up. "A thorough old Shylock," thought Starr, waiting, scanning the acrid, wizened face with its protruding black eyes, the dried-up figure in a baggy suit of blue, a white collar turned down nearly to the shoulders, and the gray hair knotted in a queue. He looked at the landlord, scowling at the interruption: M. Soulé, on the contrary, spoke heartily, as if suddenly relieved of a bore.

"Of course, of course, Starr; I'll be off by four. I'll saddle my own horse,--no need to disturb any of your people; let them sleep on Christmas at least, poor devils. The partridges about here are really worth tasting," turning to Frazier, "and Starr tells me of a mythical deer back in the hills. You see," with a bow, "it will not be possible for me to breakfast with you. I'll see you at Pittsburg about those snares,--say, on Monday."

"Yes," buttoning his coat, with a furtive glance of contempt at Soulé's burly figure and eager face. Was this the far-famed Nimrod of the money-hunt? "I'll say to Pryor you had other game on hand to-day."

"Other game,--yes," with a sudden gravity,--pushing his hair back, and looking in the fire, while the old man made his formal adieus to his wife. They lasted some time, for Madame Soulé was a courtly little body, with all her quiet.

"I must make an early start, too," said Frazier, turning again. "Glad of the chance to take a bracing ride. Banks closed to-morrow, so no time's lost, eh? Well, good night, Soulé," perceiving that the other did not see his outstretched hand; "don't come down; good night"; and so shuffled down the stairs.

"Pah!" said Soulé, with a breath of relief. "His blood's like water. He never owed a dollar, and never gave one away."

The usual genial laugh came back to his face, as he turned to Madame Soulé and began to romp with the baby lying in her lap. He was a tall man, about six feet high, with a handsome face, red hair, a frank blue eye, and a natural, genuine laugh. Whatever else history may record of him, a man of generous blood and sensitive instincts. His subdued dress, quiet voice, suited him, were indigenous to his nature, not assumed: even Starr could see that. Starr used afterwards, when they became the country's gossip, to talk of little traits in these people, showing the purity of their refinement. To this day he believes in them. How unostentatious their kindness was: the delicate, scentless air that hung about them: the fresh flowers always near. "Eating with iron forks, an' not a word,--my silver being packed; their under-clothes like gossamer, outside plainer than mine. Bah! I know the real stuff, when I see it, I hope. No sham there!"

When the baby was tired of its romp, Madame Soulé hushed it to sleep. She was the quietest nurse ever lived,--the quietest woman,--one whom you scarce noted when with her, and forgot as soon as you left the room. Nature had made her up with its most faint, few lines, and palest coloring. Soulé, however, had found out the delicate beauty, and all else that lay beneath. There was a passionate fierceness sometimes in his look at her, and a something else stranger,--such an expression as a dog gives his master. She never talked but to him.

"I thought you would have breakfasted with him, perhaps," she said, now.

"No. I'm too much of an Arab, Judith. I can't eat a man's salt and empty his pocket at the same time."

"I'm glad you did not," smiling as the baby caught at his father's seals, then glancing at the watch when Soulé held it out for him. "Nearly eleven. It is time your brother was here. See, John, how pink its feet are, and dimpled,"--putting one to her mouth with a burst of childish laughter.

Soulé played with a solitary white calla that stood near in a crystal vase, gulped down a glass of wine hastily, held the delicate glass up to see how like a golden bubble it was, then threw it down.

"Are you sure we are right in this, child?"

She stopped playing with the baby, but did not look up.

"About your brother?"

"I thought"--with the doubtful look of one who is about to essay his strength against flint. "It has been a hard life,--Stephen's,--and through us. What if we let him go?" anxiously. "What would be better? He has children,"--taking the baby's hand in his.

"Yes, children,--clods, like his wife,"--the pink lip curling. "You should know your brother, John Yarrow. You do know the stuff that is in him. Will his brain ever muddle down to find comfort in that inn-keeper's daughter? Is it likely? Besides, they are dead to him now. You have succeeded in keeping them apart."

If she saw the dark flush in his face at this, she did not notice it, but went on hastily.

"Stephen never had a chance, and you know it, John. He was too weak to break the trammels at home, as you did,--let himself be forced to preach what his soul knew was a lie. When you tried to open the door for him to a broader life"--

"I shut him in a penitentiary-cell," with a bitter laugh. "They taught him to make shoes."

"Was it your fault? Now that he is free, then," going on steadily, still patting the child's cheek, "you mean to shake him off,--having used him. Push him back into the old slough. He can make a decent living there, cobbling, I know. Be generous, John," with a keen glance of the pale brown eyes. "If you succeed in this thing to-morrow, take him with us out of the United States. There is trouble coming here. Give him a chance for education,--to know something of the world he lives in,--to catch one or two free breaths before he dies. He has been the man in the iron cage, since his birth, it seems to me."

She got up as she spoke, rang the bell, and gave the baby to its nurse, wrapping it up in a blanket or two. When she turned, her husband was standing on the hearth-rug, a half-laugh in his eyes.

"Judith!"

"What is it?"

"The plain meaning of all this is, that there is no one who can do this foul job to-morrow but Stephen Yarrow, and for my sake it must be done; _ergo_--Well, well! You do love me, child!"

Her eyes filled with sudden tears; she caught hold of his arm, and clung to it.

"I do love you, God knows! What is Stephen Yarrow to me, soul or body? Don't be harsh with me, John!"

"Harsh? No, Judith," stroking the colorless curls gently; looking back; thinking that she had done much for him; he would humor her whim, not behave like a beast to _her_. But his brother--It would be better for Stephen in the end. Certainly. Yet he sighed: a womanish, unable sigh.

A year or two afterwards, (for I am not writing of a fictitious character,) this man's frauds were discovered. They were larger and more uniformly successful than any that had ever been perpetrated in the States, but there was about them a subtle, dogged daring that did not belong to Yarrow's character, and shrewd people who had known them began to talk of this shadow of a woman who went about with him,--a quadroon, they said,--and hinted strongly that it was she who had been the vital power of the partnership, and Yarrow but the well-chosen tool. There are no means of knowing the truth of the conjecture, for Yarrow escaped: she followed him, but is dead, so their secret is safe. Fraud, however, was but one half of his story. Soulé gave like a prince,--secretly, with a woman-like, anxious helpfulness, a passionate eagerness, as if the pain or want of a human being were insufferable to him. In this he was alone: the woman had no share in it. She was as cold, impervious to the suffering of others as nothing but a snake or a selfish woman can be: whatever muddy human feeling did ooze from her brain was for this man only. And yet, when we think of it, she was, as they guessed, a quadroon: maybe, under the low, waxy-skinned forehead that Yarrow's fingers were patting that night there might have been a revengeful consciousness of the wrongs of her race that justified to her the harm she did. It is likely: the coarsest negroes argue in that way. God help them! At any rate, we shall come closest to Christ's rule of justice in trying to find a sore heart behind the vicious fingers of the woman.

While the two stood in the pleasant light of the warm room waiting for him, Stephen Yarrow came towards the house across the fields. It was his shadow that his wife and Jem saw crossing Shag's Hill. He was a free man now,--by virtue of his nickname, "quiet Stevy," in part. It startled him as much as the jailer, when his release was sent in a year before the time, "in consideration of his uniform good conduct." The truth was, that M. Soulé took an interest in the poor wretch, and had said a few words in his favor to the Governor at a dinner-party the other evening, so the release was signed the next day. Soulé had called to see the man when he came to Pittsburg, and spent an hour or two in his cell. The next morning he was free to go, but he had stayed a week longer, making a pair of red morocco shoes for the jailer's little girl,--idling over them: when they were done, tying them on, himself, with a wonderful bow-knot, and looking anxiously in her clean Dutch face to see if she were pleased.

"Kiss the gentleman, Meg," growled Ben. "Where's yer manners?"

Stephen drew back sharply. The innocent baby! who lived out-of-doors! Ben must have forgotten who _he_ was: a thief, belonging to this cell. They were going to let him out; but what difference did that make? His thin face grew wet with perspiration, as he walked away. Why, his very fingers had felt too impure to him, as he tied on her shoes. He went away an hour after, only nodding goodbye to Ben, looking down with an odd grin at the clothes he had asked the jailer to buy for him. Ben had chosen a greenish coat and trousers and yellow waistcoat. He did not shake hands with him. Ben had been mixing hog-food, and the marks were on his fingers. This was yesterday: he was going now to meet his brother, as he requested. Well, what else was there for him to do?

He did not look up often, as he plodded over the fields: when he did, it hurt him somehow, this terrible wastefulness, this boundless unused air, and stretch of room. It even pained hiss weakened eyes: so long the oblong slip of clay running from the cell to the wall had been his share, and the yellow patch of sky and brick chimney-top beyond. For so many thousands, too, no more. But they were thieves, foul, like him. Pure men this was for. Stephen looked like an old man now, in spite of Ben's party-colored rigging: stooped and lean, his step slouched: his head almost bald under the old fur cap. Something in the sharpened face, too, looked as if more than eyesight had been palsied in these years of utter solitude: the brain was dulled with sluggishly gnawing over and over the few animal ideas they leave for prisoners' souls,--or, as probably, thoroughly imbruted by them. Soulé thought the latter.

When the convict had finished his dull walk, he sat down on the wooden staircase that led to his brother's rooms for half an hour, slowly rubbing his legs, conscious of nothing but some flesh-pain, apparently,--and when he did enter the chamber, bowed as indifferently to Soulé and his wife as though they had parted carelessly yesterday. His brother glanced at the woman: one look would certainly be enough for her. Poor Stephen's power? If it ever had been, its essence was long since exhaled: there was nothing in his whole nature now but the stalest dregs, surely? Perhaps she thought differently: she looked at the man keenly, and then gave a quick, warning glance to her husband, as she sat down to her sewing. Soulé did not heed it as he usually did: he was choked and sick to see what a wreck his brother really was. God help us! to think of the time when Stephen and he were boys together, and this was the end of it!

"Come to the fire, old fellow!" he said, huskily. "You're blue with cold. We used to have snows like this at home, eh?"

The man passed the lady with the quaint, shy bow that used to be habitual with him towards women, (he still used it to the jailer's wife,) and held his hands over the blaze. His brother followed him: his wife had never seen him so nervous or excited: he stood close to the convict, smoothing his coat on the shoulder, taking off his cap.

"Why, why! this cloth's too thin, even for summer; I--Oh, Stephen, these are hard times,--hard! But I mean to do something for you, God knows. Sit down, sit down, you're tired, boy," turning off, going to the window, his hands behind him,--coming back again. "We're going to help you, Judith and I."

Soulé did not see the look which the convict shot at the woman, when he spoke these words; but she did,--and knew, that, however her husband might contrive to deceive himself, he never would his brother. If Stephen Yarrow's soul went down to any deeper depth to-night, it would be conscious in its going. What manner of man was he? What was his wife, or long-ago home, or his old God, now, to him? It mattered to them: for, if he were not a tool, they were ruined. She stitched quietly at her soft floss and flannel. Soulé was sincere; let him explain what his wish was, himself; it would be wiser for her to be silent; this man, she remembered, had eyes that never understood a lie.

Yarrow did not sit down; his brother stood close, leaning his unsteady hand upon his arm.

"I knew you would not fail me, Stephen. To-morrow will be a turning-point in both our lives. Circumstances have conspired to help me in my plan."

He began to stammer. The other looked at him quietly, inquiringly.

"You remember what I told you on Tuesday?" more hastily. "I have dealt heavily in stocks lately; it needs one blow more, and our future is secure for life. Yours and mine, I mean,--yours and mine, Stephen. This paper old Frazier carries,--he Is going to New York with it. If I can keep it out of the market for a week, my speculation is assured,--I can realize half a million, at least. Frazier is an old man, weak: he crosses the Narrows to-morrow morning on horseback."

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"--