The Convict: A Tale

by G. P. R. James

As soon as Edgar entered the room, the form of a man raised itself slowly and painfully up in the bed, supporting itself on the right arm, and a pair of hollow eyes gazed at him earnestly. The head was surrounded with a bandage, and the wild gray hair floated loose about it; while beneath appeared a countenance full of intelligence, but worn and haggard, apparently with sickness and suffering. The hue of robust health was totally gone; and the pale, yellow, waxy tint of the skin seemed more sallow from a black plaster down one check, and a gray and reddish beard of eight or nine days' growth. No one, probably, who had known Norries in health, would have recognised him at that moment; and Edgar Adelon who had never seen him, except once as a boy, imagined at first that there must be some mistake. Association, as it is called, is perhaps one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the human mind: not alone in the rapid power which it has of awakening recollection from the slumber of long years to the things of the past, but in the strange difference of the means by which it is itself excited. With one man it is a sight; with another, a sound; with another, an odour; with another, a taste, which calls up suddenly scenes and circumstances and persons, which have been long buried beneath the sand and rubbish of passing things in the course of years. With Edgar Adelon the exciting cause, in almost all instances, was sound; and the moment Mr. Norries spoke, he recollected his voice, and the place where he had last beheld him; and all that then took place flashed back upon his memory like a scene in a dream.

"Are you Mr. Adelon?" demanded the wounded man.

"The same," answered Edgar.

"What! not the boy who came to call upon Mr. Sherborne, with Sir Arthur Adelon, some six or seven years ago?" rejoined Norries. "How you are changed!"

"Greatly, I believe," replied Edgar; "but you are very much changed too, Mr. Norries, and I regret to see that the alteration has been effected by illness."

"Ay!" answered the other, gloomily, "they have brought the strong man to infant weakness, and the daring man to skulk in a hole like this. If others had been as resolute and as vigorous, the case would have been different. But I have not regrets for myself, Mr. Adelon. I regret that another opportunity has been lost for my country: an opportunity which may never return. I regret that my countrymen, in their feebleness and their timidity, have suffered the golden moment to slip from them, after boasting that they were ready to seize it, and to dare all odds to render it available to the common good. They fled, sir, like a flock of sheep, from a handful of men in red coats, and I am almost hopeless of them. I went down, it is true, almost at the first, with a bitter wound in my side, and my horse shot under me; but if they had then rushed on--ay, though they had trampled the soul out of my body--they would have gained the day, and I would have blessed them. Nevertheless, the time may yet come, and I will live for it. Only one success, to give them confidence in themselves, to knit them together, to prove to them that they can fight and conquer if they will, and all is secure. It is the novelty of the thing that scares them: and those Frenchmen, too, who ran at the very first shot, what do they deserve? But I forget; we are rambling from the point."

"You seem to have been badly wounded, indeed," replied Edgar, as the sick man sunk back upon his pillow, exhausted with the stern vehemence of his own thoughts; "but tell me, Mr. Norries, have you proper attendance here? Such wounds as yours would need a skilful surgeon."

"They were sharp ones," answered Norries, "and not few; for I had just staggered up, and was calling some few stout hearts around me, when the cavalry dashed in amongst us. One cut at me, and gashed my cheek, and another brought me down with a blow over the head. They passed on, thinking me dead; and so I should have been very soon if that brave fellow, Oldkirk, had not dragged me away, and hiding me and himself in a dry ditch, bound up my wounds and stanched the blood. There has been many a man ennobled for a worse deed; but he will have his reward here or hereafter. The people here are very kind to me, too. I saved their little property for them one time, by the few scraps of law I ever learned, and they are grateful: it is a marvel, as this world goes. I have a surgeon from a distant town, and I drink his drugs, and let him probe my wounds, and let him torture me as much as he will; not that I have any faith in him, but because it pleases the good people, who think that something is being done to serve me. I need no surgeon, Mr. Adelon, but nature and a strong constitution. Surgeons and lawyers, the craft is much the same; the one tortures and destroys the body, the other the mind--both rascally trades enough! But let us think of other things. You have been seeking me--why?"

"I thought Oldkirk had told you," replied Edgar. "I gave him all the needful particulars last night."

"He told me something of it," answered Norries, "but not the whole. Besides, I forget. Lying here in this gloomy sickness, my thoughts wander over many things, like the dove of the deluge, finding no place to rest upon. Let me hear the business from your own lips."