The mention of stone and quarry by Mr Richard Gaskett fits significantly enough here into the context of sinister events. They are to be found nowhere in more suggestive juxtaposition than in the island of Portland, where the great prison is.
One fair November morning the gates of this terrific stronghold were opened to discharge a time-expired convict. The man walked plump out of Hades into Elysium. Like many another expurgatus, he bore the scars of his cleansing indelibly printed on him. The governor of Hades, it must be remembered, fathered the Furies, and the business of the Furies is to lash, lash, irrespective of any consideration of moral deserts.
This prisoner had, for full twenty years, been persistently clamorous of his innocence—at first in Italian; later in Italian English; finally in a dialect hybrid of English and despair. He had forgotten his tongue, his personality, his meaning in the world: only the sense of a gigantic wrong remained with him.
For some time prior to his discharge he had been permitted to resume himself, to grow his hair and beard, so that he might never protest that he had been restored to existence a marked man. His hair and beard came white where they had been black; his face was the drawn grey face of an old man; he could resume nothing of his past whatever, not even that deadly conviction of injury, for that indeed had dwelt with him throughout. Save for it, he walked out of the gates reborn to age, not youth.
They had been glad enough to get rid of him. Even prison officialdom grows weary of kicking back into its kennel the caged and struggling wolf, so helplessly barred from his natural diet, and so naturally seeking an escape to it. This Antonio Geoletti had made more than one such attempt, and been ruinously flogged for it. He had suffered darkness, famine, solitary confinement, more than reason, his own or others, could comfortably consider; yet what was to be done with a man who could not be induced to accept an error of the law—if such, indeed, had been committed—with an accommodating philosophy? As a convict—which was solely how officialdom was called upon to regard him—he had been unspeakable—a very bad egg indeed. His good marks were nil; his livery of disgrace, when he was summoned to doff it, was still of the most conspicuous colour—the bright yellow which betokens the irreclaimable standard; it had been to the official discomfiture, no less than to his own, that his conduct had obliged the law to exact of him his full term of punishment. And in the end, the only profit was his: he crept out of Hades an unticketed man, free to pursue, unwatched, the solitary purpose that survived to him—vengeance on the authors of his unheard-of sufferings.
The question remained, were those beings still in being? Antonio never even put that question to himself. Vengeance is timeless. For all those twenty years of elsewise obliteration, the lust for it was as red in him at this day as when he had heard himself convicted on false evidence of a heinous offence, and had vainly striven, a foreigner and incoherent, to explain to the Court the real purport of a villain’s traducing. He could not believe for an instant that the God of his superstition had let the work of his legitimate hands be anticipated by another. No; the men remained to him somewhere. Only to find them!
I do not ask your sympathy for this Antonio Geoletti. If he had been convicted unjustly, he had been purposing a crime at the moment which merited a just conviction. He may have got his deserts indirectly; though, to be sure, there was no automatic standard for apportioning its exact term of punishment to either offence. The measures of the law are not even comparative measures, and many men all over the land are suffering under widely different sentences for a like crime. Only, self-consciousness of one evil-doing does not reconcile one to punishment for an imaginary other. That is human nature; and for all the moral purposes of this record, Antonio felt himself the divinely commissioned, though long wickedly withheld, minister of retribution. But at last his time was come.
It was the sense, the indelible haunting of this obligation which upheld him through all the terrific experience of his first re-emergence into the arena of living things. The pale November sunlight smote upon his eyes like the blast from a sudden-opened furnace; the speech of free people struck him as almost a sacrilege, being uttered unconcerned in this boundless temple of God’s own liberty; he blinked and staggered like a disentombed miner.
The prison frowned behind him; the island with its quarries smiled before. How often had he cursed those indurate blocks, symbols of the system to which he appealed in vain—thrown down his ringing tools upon them in a monstrous rage of helplessness, and turned to find a warder’s gun barrel at his head! Now they lay in the mist as soft as fairy bales, all their sinister weight drawn out of them, objects potentially suggestive of the noble fabrics in which each was to have its place. He heard a robin singing, and his eyes came wet with tears. Sobbing, God help him, like a woman, and always, and never changing, with that dream of blood in his heart, he crept out into the world.
How beautiful a thing it was, apart from its people! He had forgotten how soft the sunlight lay on it, how green the grass could grow, how fathomless was the blue of heaven. Limit and close obstruction were all he had known for so long. Even the daily tramp to the quarries had entailed a guard on speech and sight. Now he was free to gaze to drunkenness; to sing, if he would.