FullReads

I remembered everything, but through a fluffy atmosphere, so to speak. It was as if I looked on bygone pictures through ground glass that softened the ugly outlines.

Sometimes I referred to these to my substitute, who was wise to answer me according to my mood; for the truth left me unruffled, whereas an obvious evasion of it would have distressed me.

“Hammond,” I said one day, “I have never yet asked you. How did I give my evidence at the inquest?”

“Like a doctor and a sane man.”

“That’s good. But it was a difficult course to steer. You conducted the post-mortem. Did any peculiarity in the dead man’s face strike you?”

“Nothing but this: that the excessive contraction of the bicipital muscles had brought the features into such forcible contact with the bars as to cause bruising and actual abrasion. He must have been dead some little time when you found him.”

“And nothing else? You noticed nothing else in his face–a sort of obliteration of what makes one human, I mean?”

“Oh, dear, no! nothing but the painful constriction that marks any ordinary fatal attack of angina pectoris.–There’s a rum breach of promise case in the paper to-day. You should read it; it’ll make you laugh.”

I had no more inclination to laugh than to sigh; but I accepted the change of subject with an equanimity now habitual to me.

* * * * *

One morning I sat up in bed, and knew that consciousness was wide awake in me once more. It had slept, and now rose refreshed, but trembling. Looking back, all in a flutter of new responsibility, along the misty path by way of which I had recently loitered, I shook with an awful thankfulness at sight of the pitfalls I had skirted and escaped–of the demons my witlessness had baffled.

The joy of life was in my heart again, but chastened and made pitiful by experience.

Hammond noticed the change in me directly he entered, and congratulated me upon it.

“Go slow at first, old man,” he said. “You’ve fairly sloughed the old skin; but give the sun time to toughen the new one. Walk in it at present, and be content.”

I was, in great measure, and I followed his advice. I got leave of absence, and ran down for a month in the country to a certain house we wot of, where kindly ministration to my convalescence was only one of the many blisses to be put to an account of rosy days.

” Then did my love awake,

Most like a lily-flower,

And as the lovely queene of heaven,

So shone shee in her bower. “

Ah, me! ah, me! when was it? A year ago, or two-thirds of a lifetime? Alas! “Age with stealing steps hath clawde me with his crowch.” And will the yews root in my heart, I wonder?

I was well, sane, recovered, when one morning, towards the end of my visit, I received a letter from Hammond, enclosing a packet addressed to me, and jealously sealed and fastened. My friend’s communication ran as follows:–

“There died here yesterday afternoon a warder, Johnson–he who had that apoplectic seizure, you will remember, the night before poor Shrike’s exit. I attended him to the end, and, being alone with him an hour before the finish, he took the enclosed from under his pillow, and a solemn oath from me that I would forward it direct to you, sealed as you will find it, and permit no other soul to examine or even touch it. I acquit myself of the charge, but, my dear fellow, with an uneasy sense of the responsibility I incur in thus possibly suggesting to you a retrospect of events which you had much best consign to the limbo of the–not unexplainable, but not worth trying to explain. It was patent from what I have gathered that you were in an overstrung and excitable condition at that time, and that your temporary collapse was purely nervous in its character. It seems there was some nonsense abroad in the prison about a certain cell, and that there were fools who thought fit to associate Johnson’s attack and the other’s death with the opening of that cell’s door. I have given the new Governor a tip, and he has stopped all that. We have examined the cell in company, and found it, as one might suppose, a very ordinary chamber. The two men died perfectly natural deaths, and there is the last to be said on the subject. I mention it only from the fear that enclosed may contain some allusion to the rubbish, a perusal of which might check the wholesome convalescence of your thoughts. If you take my advice, you will throw the packet into the fire unread. At least, if you do examine it, postpone the duty till you feel yourself absolutely impervious to any mental trickery, and–bear in mind that you are a worthy member of a particularly matter-of-fact and unemotional profession.”

* * * * *