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The lock on the cell-door was broken, so he only closed it, then started back toward the guardroom. "Three rifles, and three ammunition pouches gone!" he muttered. "That's three weapons they've got, in any case. A hornet's nest'd be better stopping in than this place." He overtook the men who were carrying in the nail-killed sentry, and he saw that their faces were drawn and white.
He turned, and there was the monk at his cell-door, in a strange state of anxiety, going up and down and beating the air double-handed, like a bottom sawyer. Gerard really thought the cell he was at must be inhabited by some dangerous wild beast, if not by that personage whose presence in the convent had been so distinctly proclaimed. He looked back inquiringly and went on to the next door.
Within the station I could see an officer quietly busy at his desk, as if he had been sitting there ever since Dickens described "the Night Inspector, with a pen and ink ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office as studiously as if he were in a monastery on the top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the back yard at his elbow."
The sour face of Gimblett appeared at the trap cell-door. "All right?" he asked, somewhat so the three thought less sourly than usual. "All right," was the reply, and Mooney added, "Good-night, Mr. Gimblett." "I wonder what is making the old man so cheerful," thought Gimblett, as he got into the next corridor.
It occurred to me on the instant that this was the real reason for my being summoned. These were days of universal suspicion, and the worthy sheriff had his doubts even of Daisy. "All right! Let me see the man," I said, and we entered the jail. When the soldier in charge had opened the cell-door, the object of our interest was discovered to be asleep. Frey shook him vigorously by the shoulder.
The prisoner's cell-door was left open, in the hope that he would escape, just as, later, George Francis Train enjoyed the distinction of being the only man who was literally kicked down the stone steps of the Tombs. Garrison was thrust out of limbo, with a warning, and a hint that Boston-town was a good place for him to emigrate from.
As he passed up the Great Cloister there was no sound but from a bird or two singing in the afternoon sunlight of the garth; each cell-door, with its hatch for the passage of food, was closed and silent; and Ralph felt a curious quickening of his heart as he thought of the human life passed in the little houses, each with its tiny garden, its workshop, its two rooms, and its paved ambulatory, in which each solitary lived.
His eyes were caught by a figure, the figure of Cassidy, advancing there in the corridor. And with the detective went a man whose gait was slinking, craven. A cell-door swung open, the prisoner stepped within, the door clanged to, the bolts shot into their sockets noisily.
"Bah!" was the only reply he received, and the next moment he was alone again. A mocking laugh came from the opposite cell-door grating, and naturally the abandoned youth looked in the direction. But the face he saw between the bars was hideous enough to make his blood almost curdle.
Sorrow is the great birth-agony of immortal powers, sorrow is the great searcher and revealer of hearts, the great test of truth; for Plato has wisely said, sorrow will not endure sophisms, all shams and unrealities melt in the fire of that awful furnace. Sorrow reveals forces in ourselves we never dreamed of. The soul, a bound and sleeping prisoner, hears her knock on her cell-door, and wakens.
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