There is little to be told of the life in the penitentiary. It is very uniform. To eat prison fare without even the decency of a knife or fork—you might kill a guard or a fellow-rogue with a fork—to sleep in a narrow, rough cell on a hard bed, to have your cell unlocked and to be marched out under guard in the morning, to go in a row of prisoners to wash your face, to go in a procession to a frugal breakfast served on tin plates in a dining-room mustier than a cellar, to be marched to your work, to be watched by a guard while you work, to know that the guard has a loaded revolver and is ready to draw it on slight provocation, to march to meals under awe of the revolver, to march to bed while the man with the revolver walks behind you, to be locked in and barred in and double-locked in again, to have a piece of candle that will burn two hours, to burn it out and lie down in the darkness—to go through one such day and know that you have to endure three thousand six hundred and fifty-two days like it—that is about all. The life of a blind horse in a treadmill is varied and cheerful in comparison.
Oh! yes, there is Sunday. I forgot the Sunday. On Sundays you don't have to work in the shops. You have the blessed privilege of sitting alone in your bare cell all the day, except the hour of service. You can think about the outside world and wish you were out. You can read, if you can get anything interesting to read. You can count your term over, think of a broken life, of the friends of other days who feel disgraced at mention of your name, get into the dumps, and cry a little if you feel like it. Only crying doesn't seem to do much good. Such is the blessedness of the holy Sabbath in prison!
But Charlton did not let himself pine for liberty. He was busy with plans for reconstructing his life. What he would have had it, it could not be. You try to build a house, and it is shaken down about your ears by an earthquake. Your material is, much of it, broken. You can never make it what you would. But the brave heart, failing to do what it would, does what it can. Charlton, who had hated the law as a profession, was now enamored of it. He thought rightly that there is no calling that offers nobler opportunities to a man who has a moral fiber able to bear the strain. When he should have finished his term, he would be thirty-one, and would be precluded from marriage by his disgrace. He could live on a crust, if necessary, and be the champion of the oppressed. What pleasure he would have in beating Conger some day! So he arranged to borrow law-books, and faithfully used his two hours of candle in studying. He calculated that in ten years—if he should survive ten years of life in a cell—he could lay a foundation for eminence in legal learning. Thus he made vinegar-barrels all day, and read Coke on Littleton on Blackstone at night. His money received from the contractor for over-work, he used to buy law-books.
Sometimes he hoped for a pardon, but there was only one contingency that was likely to bring it about. And he could not wish for that. Unless, indeed, the prison-officers should seek a pardon for him. From the beginning they had held him in great favor. When he had been six months in prison, his character was so well established with the guards that no one ever thought of watching him or of inspecting his work.
He felt a great desire to have something done in a philanthropic way for the prisoners, but when the acting chaplain, Mr. White, preached to them, he always rebelled. Mr. White had been a steamboat captain, a sheriff, and divers other things, and was now a zealous missionary among the Stillwater lumbermen. The State could not afford to give more than three hundred dollars a year for religious and moral instruction at this time, and so the several pastors in the city served alternately, three months apiece. Mr. White was a man who delivered his exhortations with the same sort of vehemence that Captain White had used in giving orders to his deck-hands in a storm; he arrested souls much as Sheriff White had arrested criminals. To Albert's infidelity he gave no quarter. Charlton despised the chaplain's lack of learning until he came to admire his sincerity and wonder at his success. For the gracefulest and eruditest orator that ever held forth to genteelest congregation, could not have touched the prisoners by his highest flight of rhetoric as did the earnest, fiery Captain-Sheriff-Chaplain White, who moved aggressively on the wickedness of his felonious audience.
When Mr. White's three months had expired, there came another pastor, as different from him as possible. Mr. Lurton was as gentle as his predecessor had been boisterous. There was a strong substratum of manly courage and will, but the whole was overlaid with a sweetness wholly feminine and seraphic. His religion was the Twenty-third Psalm. His face showed no trace of conflict. He had accepted the creed which he had inherited without a question, and, finding in it abundant sources of happiness, of moral development, and spiritual consolation, he thence concluded it true. He had never doubted. It is a question whether his devout soul would not have found peace and edification in any set of opinions to which he had happened to be born. You have seen one or two such men in your life. Their presence is a benison. Albert felt more peaceful while Mr. Lurton stood without the grating of his cell, and Lurton seemed to leave a benediction behind him. He did not talk in pious cant, he did not display his piety, and he never addressed a sinner down an inclined plane. He was too humble for that. But the settled, the unruffled, the unruffleable peacefulness and trustfulness of his soul seemed to Charlton, whose life had been stormier within than without, nothing less than sublime. The inmates of the prison could not appreciate this delicate quality in the young minister. Lurton had never lived near enough to their life for them to understand him or for him to understand them. He considered them all, on general principles, as lost sinners, bad, like himself, by nature, who had superadded outward transgressions and the crime of rejecting Christ to their original guilt and corruption as members of the human family.
Charlton watched Lurton with intense interest, listened to all he had to say, responded to the influence of his fine quality, but found his own doubts yet unanswered and indeed untouched. The minister, on his part, took a lively interest in the remarkable young man, and often endeavored to remove his doubts by the well-knit logical arguments he had learned in the schools.
"Mr. Lurton," said Charlton impatiently one day, "were you ever troubled with doubt?"
"I do not remember that I ever seriously entertained a doubt in regard to religious truth in my life," said Lurton, after reflection.
"Then you know no more about my doubts than a blind man knows of your sense of sight." But after a pause, he added, laughing: "Nevertheless, I would give away my doubtativeness any day in exchange for your peacefulness." Charlton did not know, nor did Lurton, that the natures which have never been driven into the wilderness to be buffeted of the devil are not the deepest.