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I believed the iron to be my convict's iron, the iron I had seen and heard him filing at, on the marshes, but my mind did not accuse him of having put it to its latest use. For I believed one of two other persons to have become possessed of it, and to have turned it to this cruel account. Either Orlick, or the strange man who had shown me the file.
He is a prisoner, accused of murder. So be it. I love him. He is guilty! What of that? I love him. You will condemn him, you will dishonour him. Condemned and dishonoured, I shall love him still. You will send him to a convict prison. I will follow him; and in the prison, under the convict's dress, I will yet love him. If he falls to the bottom of the abyss, I will fall with him.
"Are you afraid to do it?" asked the warden. A momentary light flashed in the convict's eyes. "No!" he gasped; "you know I am not. But I can't not yet, not yet." The convict, whose ghastly pallor, glassy eyes, and gleaming teeth sat like a mask of death upon his face, staggered to his feet. "You have done it at last! you have broken my spirit.
And he was condemned to this vagabond convict's life solely because his mother had yielded to a man's caresses. He walked on, his heart sinking with the despairing sorrow of those who are doomed to exile.
Kenneth Macaulay and Fitzjames were counsel for the defence, but failed, and, as Fitzjames thought, rightly failed, to make good their case. He was, however, deeply moved by the whole affair the most dramatic, he says, in which he had been engaged. The convict's family were respectable people, and behaved admirably.
"You mean," he said bitterly, "that you saw through my shallow pretenses all the while. I know now how you must have despised me." "Is it nothing that you have asked me a convict's daughter to be your wife?" she asked. "Do you think I don't know that some men would have thanked heaven for their escape and never spoken to me again?
"Sometimes the twisting comes on, but when I wake up after it I'm all right." The prison surgeon, under the chairman's direction, put his ear to the convict's chest, and then went over and whispered to the chairman. "I thought so," said that gentleman. "Now, take this man to the hospital. Put him to bed where the sun will shine on him, and give him the most nourishing food."
Did you ever see the dungeon?" "Perhaps; but you may tell us about it." The cold, steady gleam returned to the convict's eyes, as he fixed them again upon the chairman. "There are several little rooms in the dungeon. The one they put me in was about five feet by eight. It has steel walls and ceiling, and a granite floor. The only light that comes in passes through a slit in the door.
Were it possible to search out these unhappy men, some of them wearing the convict's garb, and some wandering as fugitives in foreign lands, henceforth to be men "without a country," and question each for the cause of his deep disgrace, from all would come this shameful confession: "I loved evil and hated the law of God."
"The convict's benefactor or, perhaps I should say, master loved a woman who refused to listen to him. The girl, for some reason, left home, very suddenly and unexpectedly to any one. She left a hurried note, saying, only, that she was going away. By accident, the man found the note and saw his opportunity. He guessed that the girl would go to friends in the mountains.
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