I shook my head; I think I sighed a little. "I think I've forgotten, sir," I said. "So many winters—so many times when the sun shone, and I knew the summer had come again—but I have lost count of the years."
"You were here before my time," he said; and then added in what seemed to be a hushed voice: "You have been here for twenty years."
I said again that I had not kept count; I think I added a little wearily that it did not matter. His kindly voice went on—
"You were a boy when you came—twenty years of age. You must be forty now—still a young man. You have many years before you—years of freedom, in which you may live a new life." He spoke kindly and encouragingly, but the glance he gave me showed me that he knew I was an old and broken man, despite my years.
"It is too late for me to begin anything, sir," I said. "What life I had lies back behind the twenty years; I cannot take up any broken threads of it now. I did not expect ever to have to take up any free life again." I was moving towards the door, beyond which the warder awaited me, when I came back to him, on a sudden impulse that I would plead with him. "If I might stay here—and go on with what work I have learnt to do—I should be happier," I said. "If I wish to stay, you will not turn me out? God help me—this is my home."
He got up hurriedly from the table, and turned away for a moment, and cleared his throat. "It doesn't rest with me," he said abruptly at last; "I, like you, can only obey orders. Clothes will be provided for you, and a sum of money given you which you have earned; also you will get an order on the railway company which will take you to London. And I hope you'll do well."
I went to the door, turning back for a moment to thank him for what he had done, and to assure him again, something to his bewilderment, that I would have been glad to stop. For I was afraid of the great world outside, and I was too old and broken to begin again. I remember that I thought, bitterly enough, as I had thought before, that it would have been so much better if they had killed me at the first.
It was a wintry morning when I stepped out through the great gates of the prison—a free man. They had all been very kind to me; most of the warders whom I knew well had shaken hands with me, and had given me little common keepsakes by which to remember them; I had been infinitely touched by the fact that one and all spoke to me as "Sir." I went with reluctant feet; strange as it may seem, I looked back more than once hungrily as I went out through the prison yard that I was to see no more, and through the great courtyard. A little wicket in the gate opened, and I shook hands with the man in charge there; and so left them all behind. Before me stretched a long road downwards towards a town in the far distance; I saw smoke rising lazily from its chimneys in the early morning air; all around me lay the great wastes of snow. And I alone, as it seemed, in the world—to begin again.
They had provided me with clothing that was new and rough, and awkward and ill-fitting; I felt like the naked impossible thing I was, that had been clothed and covered up in a hurry, so that men should not recognize me. I had a little money in my pockets, and a few odd things that had once belonged to me and had been carefully kept—things that had been mine twenty years before, and were mine again now.