I want you to understand, if you can, something of what my feelings were at that time. I had gone into that place fiercely rebelling against my fate; I had gone into it young, with the fierce hot blood of life beating in my veins. Twenty years of it had tamed me and broken me; it had been a gradual process, but a sure one nevertheless. Slowly the rot of the prison had eaten into my soul; slowly and surely I had sunk to be what I was—a thing obedient to orders, and expecting always to have life measured out in scanty regular doses for my daily consumption. Now, in a moment, I had been flung upon the world; small wonder that I turned in fear and trembling to the first creature that called me by name, and spoke a decent word to me that was not a command. I had been tossed out into the world after twenty years; I was fumbling feebly to find my place in it—and this man might be able to tell me. So I went with him down the long hill into the town; and I felt even then that I went with the trot that had been mine in the exercise yard of the prison.
We came down into the pleasant little place; there were buxom women standing at the doors of the little houses, and whistling boys in the streets, and children trooping along on their way to school. By that time I had hold of my companion's arm, the better to keep up with his easier stride; I turned with him willingly enough into a little inn in a side street of the town, where, in a quiet room where we were alone, he ordered breakfast. When the smoking food was put before me I laughed, and clapped my hands like a child. He did not eat much himself; but he seemed greatly amused and interested at seeing me eat, and seemed, too, to understand what I felt.
"That puts life into you, doesn't it?" he asked, peering at me across the table. "That makes you young again, and ready to face the world—eh?"
I nodded gratefully, although I knew that it was my money that had paid for the meal. When I had eaten all I could, he leaned across the table towards me, and looked at me closely. I smiled at him in a friendly way, because I felt that he had been good to me.
"Charles Avaline—how old are you?"
I thought for a moment, and remembered what the governor had said to me before I left the prison. "I was a mere boy of twenty when I went in there," I said, "and I have lived there for twenty years."
"A simple sum in arithmetic," said my companion, with a grim laugh. "There's a looking-glass over the fireplace," he added, pointing to it; "look at it, and see what has happened to you in twenty years, my man of forty!"
I laughed as though this were some great game he was playing; I got up and went to the looking-glass. Staring into it I saw a worn lined face, with the eyes of a tired old man set in it, and crowned with grey hair. I had not seen myself in a mirror for all those years; I looked into the startled old face of a man of sixty at least. Realizing for the first time a little who I was, and what I was—and understanding perhaps the tragedy of what I had been—I turned away, sick at heart and afraid, and looked at him. He was still seated there, with his elbows on the table, and with that grim smile hovering about his lips.
"You're an old, old man," he sneered, "of no use to any one in the world, and of no use to yourself. Your life is a thing of the past, and you can't begin again now. What are you going to do—how will you live?"
I told him that I did not know; he seemed so much stronger than I was, and so much more accustomed to the big world in which I was expected to move, that I begged him to help me if he would, and to show me what I should do. I was so much a child, after that long burial to which I had been subjected, that I could not think for myself; indeed it never occurred to me to ask how this man came to know my name, or why he had met me at the prison gates.