Paul Ralston

by Mary Jane Holmes

The words were sounding in his ears, as he continued his recollections of all that passed after they were spoken. He had a faint remembrance of sitting on the church steps with a lot of boys staring at him, and Max saying occasionally a word of sympathy and encouragement. Then the black horses came dashing up, flecked with white foam, and his father was beside him, pale and hatless. This struck him now as it had not at the time, and he said, aloud: “He was bare-headed, wasn’t he? Yes, he was. Where was his hat, I wonder? I don’t think he had it on at all. It must have blown off, and he didn’t stop to pick it up.”

It was some little diversion to settle the matter of the hat, and then he returned to what followed his father’s arrival,—a recapitulation of what he had heard before from Max, and which, had it been told him of any other person than himself, would have stamped that person as a criminal beyond doubt. Then came the arrest, how, or in what words, he did not know. He heard Tom swear at the boys and girls, too,—for there were girls there and women looking on, and he was sorry for them that delicacy should not have kept them away. Tom had helped him into the carriage with his father and Max, and they had driven to the causeway, where a flying figure, with arms akimbo and a most wonderful sun-bonnet, had met them and poured a torrent of abuse on Max, shriveled to half his size as he listened. That was Miss Hansford, the grand old woman he called her, who, at the door of the lock-up, with its mold and spiders, had taken his hand and held him back and said he should not go in there. He shuddered as he recalled the place. His present quarters were a great improvement upon the lock-up, and he was grateful for them.

“But nothing very elegant here,” he said, taking a survey of his surroundings.

Everything was clean and smelled of fresh lime, but was exceedingly plain. A bare floor, a single bed, with straw mattress, and a crazy, patchwork quilt spread over it. At this Paul rebelled and thought of his brass bedstead at home, with its lace canopy and silken covering and embroidered pillow cases. Then he continued his investigations. A hard chair, a square table, with nothing on it but a Bible, which Paul was sure had never been read,—a washstand, with a tin basin hanging over it, and pail and dipper beside it,—a shelf with a turkey red drapery around it, and on it a vase made of Gay Head pottery and warranted not to hold water. In it was a dried carnation, put there for somebody by somebody,—how long ago he could not guess, but the sight of it awoke a throb of sympathy for the poor wretch shut up as he was, and for the kind hand which had brought the little flower to make the solitude less cheerless. Over the mantel was a lithograph,—a picture of the crucifixion, with the Saviour’s dying eyes turned with love and forgiveness toward the penitent thief.

Paul had completed the inventory of his furniture and stood contemplating the picture.

“I s’pose it’s intended to point a lesson and tell the hardened criminal that there’s mercy at the last moment,” he said. “Well, I’m not a hardened criminal, and I do not need to be forgiven for shooting Jack.”

Then there came to his mind what Max and Miss Hansford and two or three more around him had said of its being a mistake which would be cleared up. He had told his father there was no mistake, and he said so again to himself, but if Jack didn’t do it, who did?

“I didn’t,” he continued. “I wasn’t there, was I? Who said they saw me?”

He was in a chair now trying to think. Suddenly what in the excitement attending the arrest he had forgotten came to him. “Elithe saw me, Elithe!” and he groaned aloud. “How could she say so? Oh, Elithe!” Had it been Clarice, it would have scarcely hurt him more cruelly. “If she saw me, I must have been there and I didn’t know it. I certainly am mad, or shall be soon if some one does not come to waken me from this nightmare,” he said.

His reason had reached the last barrier and might have leaped over it if Stevens, the jailer, had not come in with a lamp, which he put upon the table.