"No, it ain't that so much. It's just that if I've suffered, others will—" But according to Mr. Ridge further explanation was withheld, the speaker going on disappointingly to say: "Guess I'll be keepin' along. Hope you'll get your price on them pease. Awful sight of them in the market after this last dry spell."
So Jasper Fay trudged on. He trudged on patiently, with the ease of a man accustomed all his life to plodding through the soil, though now and then he paused. He paused for breath or for a minute's repose, and sometimes to listen. He listened most frequently to sounds behind him as if expecting pursuit; he listened to the barking of dogs, the gallop of grazing horses across the dark pastures, or to the occasional bray of a motorist's horn. When nothing happened, he went on again, though with each renewal of the effort his footsteps lagged more wearily.
Dawn was gray by the time he had come face to face with the long, grim house of sorrow. It was grim unintentionally, grim in spite of well-meant efforts to cheer it up and make it alluring, at least to the passer-by. For him ampelopsis had been allowed to clamber over the red-brick walls; for him a fine piece of lawn was kept neatly cut; for him the national flag floated during daylight over a grotesque pinnacle; for him a fountain plashed on feast-days. Neither fountain nor flag nor sward nor vine was visible except to the outsider, but it was for him the effect was planned. For him, too, a little common had been set apart on the other side of the roadway and garnished with a wooden bench under a noble, fan-shaped elm. Jasper Fay sat down on the bench as he had sat down on it many a time before, hunched and weary.
For the three years, or nearly, in which Matt had been shut up here the father had spent with him as many as possible of the minutes allowed for intercourse, prolonging the sense of communion by sitting and staring at the walls. In times past he had stared in patient longing for the moment of the boy's release; but this morning he only stared. Behind the staring, thought was too inactive for either retrospect or forecast; and thought was inactive because both past and future now contained elements too big for the overtaxed mind to deal with. He could only sit wearily and expectantly on the bench, watching, at the end of one of the long wings, a small gray door on which he had been told to keep his eyes.
After the first flicker of light the day came slowly. The lowlands around the prison were shrouded in a thin gray mist, through which Lombardy poplars and warders' cottages and prison walls loomed ghostly. When, a few minutes after the clock in the pinnacle had struck five, the gray door opened soundlessly and a shadowy form slipped out, the effect was like that of a departed spirit materializing within human ken.
The shadowy form shook hands with some one who remained unseen, and after it had taken a step or two forward the soundless door shut it out. It looked timorous and lone in the wide, ghostly landscape, advancing a few paces, stopping, searching, advancing again, but uncertainly. As it emerged more fully into view it disclosed a bundle in the hand, a light gray suit, and a common round straw hat. It moved as though testing ground that might give way beneath it or as trying the conditions of some new and awesome sphere of existence into which it had suddenly been thrust.
With all his remaining forces concentrated into one sharp, eager look, Jasper Fay crept forward. The ground-mist blurring his outlines, the two dim figures were face to face before the son perceived his father's presence or approach. On doing so he started back.
"Why, father! What's the matter? You look"—his voice dropped to faintness—"you look—terrible."
But the father's faculties were already too exhausted to catch the movement and note of dismay. He was drained even of emotion. All he could do was to extend his hand with the casual greeting: "Well, Matt! How are you? Come to meet you."
He explained, however, the immediate program, which was to go by the five-thirty train to Marchfield, whence by taking the short cut through Willoughby's Lane and County Street they could reach home for breakfast by seven. Home, it had to be told, was no longer the little place on the north bank of the pond, but a three-family house on the Thorley estate, with a "back piazza" for yard and nothing at all in the way of garden. A home without a garden to an old man who had lived in gardens all his life was more of an irony than a home without a rooftree, but even this evoked from the sufferer only a mild statement of the fact. Mildness, resigned and apparently satisfied, marked all the turnings of the narrative unfolded as they plodded to the station, while the son took the opportunity to scan at his leisure those changes in the sunken face that had shocked him at the moment of encounter.