“There is no air here,” said the sick man faintly. “The place pollutes it. It was fresh round about, when I walked there, years ago; but it grows hot and heavy in passing these walls. I cannot breathe it.”
“We have breathed it together for a long time,” said the old man. “Come, come.”
There was a short silence, during which the two spectators approached the bed. The sick man drew a hand of his old fellow-prisoner towards him, and pressing it affectionately between both his own, retained it in his grasp.
“I hope,” he gasped after a while, so faintly that they bent their ears close over the bed to catch the half-formed sounds his pale lips gave vent to: “I hope my merciful Judge will bear in mind my heavy punishment on earth. Twenty years, my friend, twenty years in this hideous grave! My heart broke when my child died, and I could not even kiss him in his little coffin. My loneliness since then, in all this noise and riot, has been very dreadful. May God forgive me! He has seen my solitary, lingering death.”
He folded his hands, and murmuring something more they could not hear, fell into a sleep—only a sleep at first, for they saw him smile.
They whispered together for a little time, and the turnkey, stooping over the pillow, drew hastily back. “He has got his discharge, by G—!” said the man.
He had. But he had grown so like death in life, that they knew not when he died.
CHAPTER XVII
