About daybreak they opened his prison and took him forth. He turned a fierce look on the paradise his wild love had created for a woman who now loaded his misfortunes with scorn, and muttered such bitter words under his breath that their venom turned his lips white as it passed them. In these words the last remnant of his love for Ellen Mason went out, poisoning the sweet breath of the flowers over which it swept.
CHAPTER LXIX.
SIMSBURY MINES.
At the base of Greenstown mountains, in the town of Granby, stands an old ruin, surrounded perhaps by more fearful associations than any one spot in the United States. The very tread of a stranger's foot on the soil arouses painful thoughts, for it awakens the reverberations which haunt those cavernous ruins, and every sound seems weighed down with moans, such as were for many years common to the place.
It is an old ruined prison I am writing about—one of the most terrible places of confinement ever known to this free country. A copper mine, which failed to yield its rich metal in the abundance demanded by capitalists, had been abandoned, and over the caverns hollowed out from the bosom of the earth, the authorities of Connecticut erected a prison for criminals. Thank God the place is a ruin now.
Humanity has dragged the wretched sinners from their burrowing places under ground, and given them at least pure air and the sunshine which God created alike for the innocent and the guilty. The spot is deathly silent, but you cannot pass it without an aching heart, for the misery once crowded in those caverns gathers around the imagination, and settles upon it in a heavy cloud, surcharged with groans. You know that human misery has been crowded there in masses, without air to breathe, or such light as God gives to his meanest animal. You think of this till the hollows of the mountains seem gorged with groans, and the cry of suffering souls comes up through the very pores of the earth, making the wild flowers tremble beneath the doleful misery that grew desperate beneath their roots.
A group of rambling wooden buildings thrown promiscuously together, at the foot of a range of hills, standing out bleak and bare, form the ruthless feature of a lovely landscape. One building, lifted from the abrupt descent of the mountain by a double terrace of rocks, commanding a view of the country, which contrasted its rich cultivation, pleasant homesteads, and well-filled barns with that narrow roof and meagre belfry, rose beneath the wild beauty of the mountains. This was the aspect of Newgate built over the Simsbury Mines, at the time Katharine Allen first recognized it from the highway, which she must not tread again for eight weary years.
The front building alone was visible. That long attachment which runs back toward the hills, with its range of narrow windows, and the smaller buildings crowded against it, lay in shadow, but from the distance there was something imposing in the uncouth pile. The sun was approaching its rest, and flung increasing light around the old prison, giving it gleams of false cheerfulness that never entered its walls.
Katharine, who sat in the heavy country wagon, between her guards, chained to the seat, and with her delicate wrists chafed by the iron that weighed those little hands down to her lap, looked toward the gaunt pile with a feeling of sad speculation. Why had she—an innocent woman—been sent to a place like that? for it was terrible, even in the glory of sunset. In her whole life she had committed no wrong worthy of more than gentle punishment. Was it not enough that her husband had abandoned her? that her child was dead? that her name had become a by-word in the land? Not enough that she had gone through the first and most bitter portion of her sentence—had suffered that hour of public scorn on the gallows at New Haven—a more terrible penance than if her life had been exacted, for the memory was with her always? Must the laws be forever warring at her young life? Was that huge pile to be her home for eight long years? They would crowd her down among the desperate criminals who burrowed their lives out in the bosom of that mountain, and leave her to die there.
But could she die? Would the principles of life ever give way? When the sentence had been pronounced upon her, and the judge had condemned her to go through all the forms of an ignominious death without its last horrible pangs, she had said to herself, "It is well. I shall not live through that hour. They will not kill me; but I shall drop dead on the scaffold. It is thus our Lord will be merciful, and save me from all this misery."