I sat down on a heap of stones near the gates of the prison, with my mind full of the bitter injustice of the thing. If I had been in my cell now, I should have been eating my poor breakfast—comfortably! I should have known what the day held for me. And here I was—an outcast, and tired already before the day was begun.
The mere fact of wearing civilized clothing again, however coarse and common it might be, had brought back to my remembrance something of what I had been—some faint ghostly shadow of it. I found myself looking at my coarse hands, and at the broken stunted nails, and striving to remember what those hands had been like ever so many years ago when I was a boy. Then, as a shadow fell across me, I realized that I had been sitting musing for some time; and looked up from the hands, to see a man standing in front of me.
He was a tall man, very thin, and not at all well dressed. He had a long thin nose with wide nostrils, and a short beard that was black at the roots and grey elsewhere. He stood with his hands clasped before him, and with the cold white fingers turning incessantly over each other. I wondered in a dull fashion where he had come from; but as he did not greatly interest me, I went on again looking at my hands. Then he spoke my name.
"Charles Avaline," he said, in a curious jerky voice that was only raised a little above a whisper.
I looked up at him, as I might have looked up any time during those twenty years at a warder, and spoke my number. It had been the natural thing to do with every one. "No. 145," I said, in a dull voice.
The man laughed in a disagreeable fashion as I dropped my eyes again from his face. "Poor broken devil!" he muttered to himself, and then spoke my name again. "Avaline—Charles Avaline. I don't want your number."
"They never wanted my name in there," I said, jerking my head towards the great gates of the prison. "It was always 145. But I'm Charles Avaline," I added.
He dropped his hand on my shoulder, and shook me—pulled me to my feet, in fact. "What are you sitting here for?" he demanded. "Don't you know you're free? Aren't you glad to be free?"
"What's the use?" I asked, with a shake of the head. "Don't you know I'm dead—dead to everybody? I've been in there"—I nodded at the prison with a queer sort of pride at the thought—"I've been in there twenty years."
"And might have been there another twenty, or another forty, or more than that, if you'd lived so long," he retorted. "They seem to have driven the brains out of you—what few you ever had. Look at me; have you ever seen me before?"