Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

As the carriages rolled through Center and Broome Streets and up the Bowery and on out through the mile-long cut and the quarter-mile tunnel through solid basalt, RoBards blessed the men that invented steam-engines, and the good souls who borrowed the money and paid the good toilers to lay these rails of stout wood with iron bands along the top. He blessed the men who ran that blessed locomotive. A demon of haste inspired them and they reached at times a rate well over twenty miles an hour. He covered the fourteen miles to Williamsbridge in no time at all compared to stage speed; and the fare was but a shilling! He had now only eighteen miles to make by the old-fashioned means.

He was a little cruel to the horse he hired and spared the poor hack neither uphill nor down. But then he was fiercelier lashed by his own torment.

At last his home swung into view—benign, serene, secure. No lightning, no fire, no storm had ripped open its walls. There was no excitement visible except in the fluttering of of a few birds—or were they belated leaves? The tulip tree stood up, awake, erect, the safe trustee of the home.

When he passed the Lasher place, he was afraid to go fast lest his guilt be implied in his haste. He let the galled jade jog. He even turned and looked the Lasher hovel straight in the face. As the guilty do, he stared it right in the eyes.

But Mrs. Lasher did not even turn to look at him. She was splitting wood and her bony fleshless arms seemed to give the ax three helves. Her head was simply an old sunbonnet. She was faceless, blind and deaf to everything but work—an old woodpecker of a woman hammering at a life that was hard and harsh. Yet it was not quite satisfying to have her so stupid. It was not pleasant to remember that Jud himself was notoriously worthless.

Strange, that to assassinate a Cæsar or a Henry of Navarre, to put a Socrates to the hemlock, was of a certain cruel nobility, but to annihilate an imbecile infamous! It was like stepping on a toad in the dark.

And this modern theory, that the insane and the criminal and the witless were poor sick people to be sorry for, was disturbing. Once the abnormal people had been accused of selling themselves to devils, renting their bodies to hellish tenants, earning an everlasting home in hell. But now it was the fashion to say that they were poor souls whom fate had given only broken or incomplete machines to work with, and that their punishment was a crime.

If it were true, then he had beaten to death a sick boy whose fearful deed had been the fumbling of a dolt. Even if it were untrue, he had sent a wicked youth to hell and Jud would now be frying and shrieking somewhere under RoBards’ feet.

RoBards fell into such abysmal brooding that he did not notice how the horse, a stranger to these roads, had turned into a lane and was no longer advancing but browsing on autumnal fare, nibbling with prehensile lip at an old rail. The horse himself was an imbecile of his kind.

For a long while RoBards struggled with black thoughts, each more dreadful than the other. He was like a man held at the bottom of the sea by a slimy devilfish, with searing poison and cold fire in the very touch of each writhing, enveloping arm.