If Dan's humiliation down to this moment had not been gall and wormwood to his proud and stubborn spirit the fault did not lie at the door of Quayle the Gyke. Every indignity that an unwilling prisoner could have been subjected to Dan underwent. From the moment of leaving the court-house at Ramsey, Dan was pushed and huddled and imperiously commanded with such an abundant lack of need and reason that at length the people who crowded the streets or looked from their windows—the same people, many of them, who had shrunk from Dan as he entered the town—shouted at the coroner and groaned at him. But Dan himself, who had never before accepted a blow from any man without returning it, was seen to walk tamely by the coroner's side, towering above him in great stature, but taking his rough handling like a child at his knees.
At the door of the prison where Quayle's function ended that of the sumner began, and old Gorry was a man of another mold. Twenty times he had taken charge of persons imprisoned six days for incontinence, and once he had held the governor's wife twelve hours for slander, and once again a fighting clergyman seven days for heresies in looking toward Rome, but never before had he put man, woman, or child into the pestilential hole under the floor of the old chapel. Dan he remembered since the Bishop's son was a boy in corduroys, and when the rusty key of the dungeon turned on him with a growl in its wards, and old Gorry went shivering to the guard-room above and kindled himself a fire there and sat and smoked, the good man under his rough surtout got the better of the bad jailer. Then down he went again, and with a certain shame-facedness, some half-comic, half-pathetic efforts of professional reserve, he said he wouldn't object, not he, if Dan had a mind to come up and warm himself. But Dan declined with words of cold thanks.
"No, Gorry," he said, "I don't know that I feel the cold."
"Oh, all right, all right, sit ye there, sit ye there," said Gorry. He whipped about with as much of largeness as he could simulate, rattled his keys as he went back, and even hummed a tune as he climbed the narrow stairs. But, warming itself at the fire, the poor human nature in the old man's breast began to tear him pitilessly. He could get no peace for memories that would arise of the days when Dan plagued him sorely, the sad little, happy dog. Then up he rose again, and down he went to the dungeon once more.
"I respects the ould Bishop," he said, just by way of preliminary apology and to help him to carry off his intention, "and if it be so that a man has done wrong I don't see—I don't see," he stammered, "it isn't natheral that he should be starved alive anyway, and a cold winter's night too."
"It's no more than I deserve," Dan mumbled; and at that word old Gorry whipped about as before, repeating loftily, "Sit ye there, sit ye there."
It was not for him to cringe and sue to a prisoner to come out of that foul hole, och! no; and the Bishop's sumner inflated his choking chest and went back for another pipe. But half an hour later the night had closed in, and old Gorry, with a lantern in his hand, was at the door of Dan's prison again.
"To tell the truth, sir," he muttered, "I can't get lave for a wink of sleep up yonder, and if you don't come up to the fire I wouldn't trust but I'll be forced to stay down here in the cold myself."
Before Dan could make answer there came a loud knocking from overhead. In another moment the key of the door had turned in its lock from without, and Gorry's uncertain footfall was retreating on the steps.
When Dan had first been left alone in his dark cell he had cast himself down on the broad slab cut from the rock, which was his only seat and bed. His suspense was over; the weight of uncertainty was lifted from his brain; and he tried to tell himself that he had done well. He thought of Ewan now with other feelings than before—of his uprightness, his tenderness, his brotherly affection, his frequent intercession, and no less frequent self-sacrifice. Then he thought of his own headlong folly, his blank insensitiveness, his cold ingratitude, and, last of all, of his blundering passion and mad wrath. All else on both sides was blotted from his memory in that hour of dark searching. Alone with his crime—tortured no more by blind hopes of escaping its penalty, or dread misgivings as to the measure of his guilt—his heart went out to the true friend whose life he had taken with a great dumb yearning and a bitter remorse. No cruel voice whispered now in palliation of his offense that it had not been murder, but the accident of self-defense. He had proposed the fight that ended with Ewan's death, and, when Ewan would have abandoned it, he, on his part, would hear of no truce. Murder it was; and, bad as murder is at the best, this murder had been, of all murders, most base and foul. Yes, he had done well. Here alone could he know one hour of respite from terrible thoughts. This dark vault was his only resting-place until he came to lie in the last resting-place of all. There could be no going back. Life was forever closed against him. He had spilled the blood of the man who had loved him with more than a brother's love, and to whom his own soul had been grappled with hooks of steel. It was enough, and the sick certainty of the doom before him was easiest to bear.