The Lane That Had No Turning: The Prisoner

The Prisoner

His chief occupation in the daytime was to stand on the bench by the
small barred window and watch the pigeons on the roof and in the eaves of
the house opposite. For five years he had done this. In the summer a
great fire seemed to burn beneath the tin of the roof, for a quivering
hot air rose from them, and the pigeons never alighted on them, save in
the early morning or in the evening. Just over the peak could be seen the
topmost branch of a maple, too slight to bear the weight of the pigeons,
but the eaves were dark and cool, and there his eyes rested when he tired
of the hard blue sky and the glare of the slates.

In winter the roof was covered for weeks and months by a blanket of snow
which looked like a shawl of impacted wool, white and restful, and the
windows of the house were spread with frost. But the pigeons were always
gay, walking on the ledges or crowding on the shelves of the lead pipes.
He studied them much, but he loved them more. His prison was less a
prison because of them, and during those long five years he found himself
more in touch with them than with the wardens of the prison or with any
of his fellow-prisoners. To the former he was respectful, and he gave
them no trouble at all; with the latter he had nothing in common, for
they were criminals, and he--so wild and mad with drink and anger was he
at the time, that he had no remembrance, absolutely none, of how Jean
Gamache lost his life.

He remembered that they had played cards far into the night; that they
had quarrelled, then made their peace; that the others had left; that
they had begun gaming and drinking and quarrelling again--and then
everything was blurred, save for a vague recollection that he had won all
Gamache's money and had pocketed it. Afterwards came a blank.

He waked to find two officers of the law beside him, and the body of Jean
Gamache, stark and dreadful, a few feet away.

When the officers put their hands upon him he shook them off; when they
did it again he would have fought them to the death, had it not been for
his friend, tall Medallion the auctioneer, who laid a strong hand on his
arm and said, "Steady, Turgeon, steady!" and he had yielded to the firm
friendly pressure.

Medallion had left no stone unturned to clear him at the trial, had
himself played detective unceasingly. But the hard facts remained, and on
a chain of circumstantial evidence Blaze Turgeon was convicted of
manslaughter and sent to prison for ten years. Blaze himself had said
that he did not remember, but he could not believe that he had committed
the crime. Robbery? He shrugged his shoulders at that, he insisted that
his lawyer should not reply to the foolish and insulting suggestion. But
the evidence went to show that Gamache had all the winnings when the
other members of the party retired, and this very money had been found in
Blaze's pocket. There was only Blaze's word that they had played cards
again. Anger? Possibly. Blaze could not recall, though he knew they had
quarrelled. The judge himself, charging the jury, said that he never
before had seen a prisoner so frank, so outwardly honest, but he warned
them that they must not lose sight of the crime itself, the taking of a
human life, whereby a woman was made a widow and a child fatherless. The
jury found him guilty.

With few remarks the judge delivered his sentence, and then himself,
shaken and pale, left the court-room hurriedly, for Blaze Turgeon's
father had been his friend from boyhood.

Blaze took his sentence calmly, looking the jury squarely in the eyes,
and when the judge stopped, he bowed to him, and then turned to the jury
and said:

"Gentlemen, you have ruined my life. You don't know, and I don't know,
who killed the man. You have guessed, and I take the penalty. Suppose I'm
innocent--how will you feel when the truth comes out? You've known me
more or less these twenty years, and you've said, with evidently no more
knowledge than I've got, that I did this horrible thing. I don't know but
that one of you did it. But you are safe, and I take my ten years!"

He turned from them, and, as he did so, he saw a woman looking at him
from a corner of the court-room, with a strange, wild expression. At the
moment he saw no more than an excited, bewildered face, but afterwards
this face came and went before him, flashing in and out of dark places in
a kind of mockery.

As he went from the court-room another woman made her way to him in spite
of the guards. It was the Little Chemist's wife, who, years before, had
been his father's housekeeper, who knew him when his eyes first opened on
the world.

"My poor Blaze! my poor Blaze!" she said, clasping his manacled hands.

In prison he refused to see all visitors, even Medallion, the Little
Chemist's wife, and the good Father Fabre. Letters, too, he refused to
accept and read. He had no contact, wished no contact with the outer
world, but lived his hard, lonely life by himself, silent, studious--for
now books were a pleasure to him. He had entered his prison a wild,
excitable, dissipated youth, and he had become a mature brooding man.
Five years had done the work of twenty.

The face of the woman who looked at him so strangely in the court-room
haunted him so that at last it became a part of his real life, lived
largely at the window where he looked out at the pigeons on the roof of
the hospital.

"She was sorry for me," he said many a time to himself. He was shaken
with misery often, so that he rocked to and fro as he sat on his bed, and
a warder heard him cry out even in the last days of his imprisonment:

"O God, canst Thou do everything but speak!" And again: "That hour--the
memory of that hour, in exchange for my ruined life!"

One day the gaoler came to him and said: "Monsieur Turgeon, you are free.
The Governor has cut off five years from your sentence."

Then he was told that people were waiting without--Medallion, the Little
Chemist and his wife, and others more important. But he would not go to
meet them, and he stepped into the open world alone at dawn the next
morning, and looked out upon a still sleeping village. Suddenly there
stood before him a woman, who had watched by the prison gates all night;
and she put out her hand in entreaty, and said with a breaking voice:
"You are free at last!"

He remembered her--the woman who had looked at him so anxiously and
sorrowfully in the court-room. "Why did you come to meet me?" he asked.

"I was sorry for you."

"But that is no reason."

"I once committed a crime," she whispered, with shrinking bitterness.

"That's bad," he said. "Were you punished?" He looked at her keenly,
almost fiercely, for a curious suspicion shot into his mind.

She shook her head and answered no.

"That's worse!"

"I let some one else take my crime upon him and be punished for it," she
said, an agony in her eyes. "Why was that?"

"I had a little child," was her reply.

"And the man who was punished instead?"

"He was alone in the world," she said.

A bitter smile crept to his lips, and his face was afire. He shut his
eyes, and when they opened again discovery was in them.

"I remember you now," he said. "I remember now.

"I waked and saw you looking at me that night! Who was the father of your
child?"

"Jean Gamache," she replied. "He ruined me and left me to starve."

"I am innocent of his death!" he said quietly and gladly.

She nodded. He was silent for a moment. "The child still lives?" he
asked. She nodded again. "Well, let it be so," he said. "But you owe me
five years--and a good name."

"I wish to God I could give them back!" she cried, tears streaming down
her cheeks. "It was for my child; he was so young."

"It can't be helped now," he said sighing, and he turned away from her.

"Won't you forgive me?" she asked bitterly.

"Won't you give me back those five years?"

"If the child did not need me I would give my life," she answered. "I owe
it to you."

Her haggard, hunted face made him sorry; he, too, had suffered.

"It's all right," he answered gently. "Take care of your child."

Again he moved away from her, and went down the little hill, with a cloud
gone from his face that had rested there five years. Once he turned to
look back. The woman was gone, but over the prison a flock of pigeons
were flying. He took off his hat to them.

Then he went through the town, looking neither to right nor left, and
came to his own house, where the summer morning was already entering the
open windows, though he had thought to find the place closed and dark.

The Little Chemist's wife met him in the doorway. She could not speak,
nor could he, but he kissed her as he had done when he went condemned to
prison. Then he passed on to his own room, and entering, sat down before
the open window, and peacefully drank in the glory of a new world. But
more than once he choked down a sob rising in his throat.

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