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The Inmate Of The Dungeon
by
The convict gasped and leaned forward eagerly.
“Until the receipt of this letter,” resumed the warden, “I had opposed the movement which had been started for your pardon; but when this letter came I recommended your pardon, and it has been granted. Besides, you have a serious heart trouble. So you are now discharged from the prison.”
The convict stared, and leaned back speechless. His eyes shone with a strange, glassy expression, and his white teeth glistened ominously between his parted lips. Yet a certain painful softness tempered the iron in his face.
“The stage will leave for the station in four hours,” continued the warden. “You have made certain threats against my life.” The warden paused; then, in a voice that slightly wavered from emotion, he continued: “I shall not permit your intentions in that regard–for I care nothing about them–to prevent me from discharging a duty which, as from one man to another, I owe you. I have treated you with a cruelty the enormity of which I now comprehend. I thought I was right. My fatal mistake was in not understanding your nature. I misconstrued your conduct from the beginning, and in doing so I have laid upon my conscience a burden which will imbitter the remaining years of my life. I would do anything in my power, if it were not too late, to atone for the wrong I have done you. If before I sent you to the dungeon, I could have understood the wrong and foreseen its consequences, I would cheerfully have taken my own life rather than raise a hand against you. The lives of us both have been wrecked; but your suffering is in the past–mine is present, and will cease only with my life. For my life is a curse, and I prefer not to keep it.”
With that the warden, very pale, but with a clear purpose in his face, took a loaded revolver from a drawer and laid it before the convict.
“Now is your chance,” he said, quietly: “no one can hinder you.”
The convict gasped and shrank away from the weapon as from a viper.
“Not yet–not yet,” he whispered, in agony.
The two men sat and regarded each other without the movement of a muscle.
“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. A human word has done what the dungeon and the whip could not do…. It twists inside of me now…. I could be your slave for that human word.” Tears streamed from his eyes. “I can’t help crying. I’m only a baby, after all–and I thought I was a man.”
He reeled, and the warden caught him and seated him in the chair. He took the convict’s hand in his and felt a firm, true pressure there. The convict’s eyes rolled vacantly. A spasm of pain caused him to raise his free hand to his chest; his thin, gnarled fingers–made shapeless by long use in the slit of the dungeon door–clutched automatically at his shirt. A faint, hard smile wrinkled his wan face, displaying the gleaming teeth more freely.
“That human word,” he whispered–“if you had spoken it long ago, if–but it’s all–it’s all right–now. I’ll go–I’ll go to work–to-morrow.”
There was a slightly firmer pressure of the hand that held the warden’s; then it relaxed. The fingers which clutched the shirt slipped away, and the hand dropped to his side. The weary head sank back and rested on the chair; the strange, hard smile still sat upon the marble face, and a dead man’s glassy eyes and gleaming teeth were upturned toward the ceiling.