The best man

by Grace Livingston Hill

He reflected that he had told the janitor he would occupy the room with his baggage for two or three weeks perhaps, but he expected to go away on a trip this very evening. The janitor would not think it strange if he did not appear. How would it be to stay here and die? Horrible thought!

He jumped up from the floor and began his howlings and gyrations once more, but soon desisted, and sat down to be entertained by a panorama of his past life which is always unpleasantly in evidence at such times. Fine and clear in the darkness of the closet stood out the nicely laid scheme of deviltry by which he had contrived to be at last within reach of a coveted fortune.

Occasionally would come the frantic thought that just through this little mishap of a foolish clothespress catch he might even yet lose it. The fraud and trickery by which he had an heiress in his power did not trouble him so much as the thought of losing her—at least of losing the fortune. He must have that fortune, for he was deep in debt, and—but then he would refuse to think, and get up to batter at his prison door again.

Four hours his prison walls enclosed him, with inky blackness all around save for a faint glimmer of light, which marked the well-fitted base of the door as the night outside drew on. He had lighted the gas when he began dressing, for the room had already been filled with shadows, and now, it began to seem as if that streak of flickering gas light was the only thing that saved him from losing his mind.

Somewhere from out of the dim shadows a face evolved itself and gazed at him, a haggard face with piercing hollow eyes and despair written upon it. It reproached him with a sin he thought long-forgotten. He shrank back in horror and the cold perspiration stood out upon his forehead, for the eyes were the eyes of the man whose name he had forged upon a note involving trust money fifteen years before; and the man, a quiet, kindly, unsuspecting creature had suffered the penalty in a prison cell until his death some five years ago.

Sometimes at night in the first years after his crime, that face had haunted him, appearing at odd intervals when he was plotting some particularly shady means of adding to his income, until he had resolved to turn over a new leaf, and actually gave up one or two schemes as being too unscrupulous to be indulged in, thus acquiring a comforting feeling of being virtuous. But it was long since the face had come. He had settled it in his mind that the forgery was merely a patch of wild oats which he had sown in his youth, something to be regretted but not too severely blamed for, and thus forgiving himself he had grown to feel that it was more the world’s fault for not giving him what he wanted than his own for putting a harmless old man in prison. Of the shame that had killed the old man he knew nothing, nor could have understood. The actual punishment itself was all that appealed to him. He was ever one that had to be taught with the lash, and then only kept straight while it was in sight.

But the face was very near and vivid here in the thick darkness. It was like a cell, this closet, bare, cold, black. The eyes in the gloom seemed to pierce him with the thought: “This is what you made me suffer. It is your turn now. It is your turn now!” Nearer and nearer they came looking into his own, until they saw down into his very soul, his little sinful soul, and drew back appalled at the littleness and meanness of what they saw.

Then for the first time in his whole selfish life George Hayne knew any shame, for the eyes read forth to him all that they had seen, and how it looked to them; and beside the tale they told the eyes were clean of sin and almost glad in spite of suffering wrongfully.

Closer and thicker grew the air of the small closet; fiercer grew the rage and shame and horror of the man incarcerated.

Now, from out the shadows there looked other eyes, eyes that had never haunted him before; eyes of victims to whom he had never cast a half a thought. Eyes of men and women he had robbed by his artful, gentlemanly craft; eyes of innocent girls whose wrecked lives had contributed to his selfish scheme of living; even the great reproachful eyes of little children who had looked to him for pity and found none. Last, above them all were the eyes of the lovely girl he was to have married.