Dead Man's Love

by Tom Gallon

"We won't bandy words," said my uncle, getting up from my bed. "Go to bed; I'll decide what to do with you in the morning."

Now, wisely speaking, of course, I ought to have made good my escape that night. But there was a certain bravado in me—a certain feeling, however wrong, that I was justified to an extent in what I had done—for the labourer is worthy of his hire. So I went to bed, and awaited the morning with what confidence I could. Being young, I slept soundly.

I was the only living relative of Zabdiel Blowfield, and one would have thought—one, at least, who did not know him—that he would have shown some mercy. But mercy was not in his nature, and I had wounded the man in that tenderest part of him—the pocket. Incredible as it may seem, I was handed over to justice on a charge of forgery and falsification of books, and in due course I stood my trial, with my uncle as the chief witness against me.

Uncle Zabdiel made a very excellent witness, too, from the point of view of the prosecution. I—Norton Hyde—stood in the dock, I flatter myself, rather a fine figure of a young man, tall, and straight, and dark-haired; the prosecutor—and a reluctant one at that—stood bowed, and old, and trembling, and told the story of my ingratitude. He had brought me up, and he had educated me; he had fed, and clothed, and lodged me; but for him I must have died ignominiously long before. And I had robbed him, and had spent his money in riotous living. He wept while he told the tale, for the loss of the money was a greater thing than most men would suppose.

The limb of the law he had retained for the prosecution had a separate cut at me on his account. According to that gentleman I was a monster; I would have robbed a church; there was scarcely any crime in the calendar of which I would not have been capable. It was plainly suggested that the best thing that could happen to society would be to get me out of the way for as many years as possible.

The judge took up the case on something of the same lines. He preached a neat little sermon on the sin of ingratitude, and incidentally wondered what the youth of the country were coming to in these degenerate days; he left me with confidence to a jury of respectable citizens, who were, I was convinced, every man Jack of them, fathers of families. I was doomed from the beginning, and I refused to say anything in my own defence.

So they packed me off quietly out of the way for ten years; and Uncle Zabdiel, I have no doubt, went back to his old house, and thereafter engaged a clerk at a starvation wage, and kept a pretty close eye upon him. I only know that, so far as I was concerned, he sidled up to me as I was leaving the dock, and whispered, with a leer—

"You'll come out a better man, Norton—a very much better man."

Perhaps I had not realised the tragedy of the business at that time, for it must be understood that I had not in any sense of the word lived. Such small excursions as I had made into life had been but mere dippings into the great sea of it; of life itself I knew nothing. And now they were to shut me away for ten years—or a little less, if I behaved myself with decorum—and after that I was to be given an opportunity to make a real start, if the gods were kind to me.

However, it is fair to say that up to the actual moment of my escape from Penthouse Prison I had accepted my fate with some measure of resignation. I had enough to eat, and work for my hands, and I slept well; in that sense I was a young and healthy animal, with a past that had not been interesting, and a future about which I did not care to think. But as I lay in the wood all that long day better thoughts came to me; I had hopes and desires such as I had not had before. I saw in a mental vision sweet country places, and fair homes, and decent men and women; I was to meet and touch them all some day, when I had worked myself out of this present tangle. Alas! I did not then know how much I was to go through first!