If there were any remorse under his quiet, or impatience at fate, or gnawing homesickness, he did not show it. That was the last letter or message that came from his wife. The friends of other prisoners were admitted to visit them, but no one ever asked to see him; the five years went by; every day the same bar of sunlight struck across his bench, and glittered on the point of his awl, gray in winter, yellow in summer; but no day brought a word or a sign from the outer world but that. The man grew thin, mere skin and bone; but then he was scrofulous. He asked no questions, ceased at last to look up, when the jailer brought his meals, to see if he carried a letter. Sometimes, when he used to stand chafing his stubbly chin in the evening at the slit cut in the stones for his window, looking at the red brick chimney-pot he could see over the penitentiary-wall, it seemed like something of outer life, and he would mutter, "She said the boys would never know." Once, too, a year or two after that, when the jailer came into "quiet Stevy's" cell, (for so he nicknamed him,) Yarrow came up, and took him by the coat-buttons, looking up and gabbling something about Martha and the little chaps in a maudlin sort of way,—then, with a silly laugh, lay down on his pallet.
"I never felt sorry for the little whiffet before," said the fat jailer, when he came out. "He's so close; but it's a cursed shame in his people to give him the go-by that way,—there!"
But when he went back an hour or two after, he found he had gained no ground with Stevy; he was dry, silent as ever: he had come to himself, meanwhile, and shivered with disgust at the fear that any madness had made him commit himself to this mass of flesh.
"'Mortised with the sacred garlic,'" he muttered, with the usual dry twinkle in his eyes.
Ben caught the last word.
"It's a good yarb, garlic," he said, confusedly. "Uses it on hot coals mostly, under broilin' steaks. Well, good night.—He's a queer chap, though," after he had gone out,—"beyond me."
Five years being gone, Martha Yarrow, sitting by her fire to-night, could only repeat the words of her letter. She had taken out a daguerreotype of her husband, and was looking at it. He was a small man; young; dressed in a suit of rusty black, with a certain subdued, credulous, incomplete air about him, like a man forced at birth into some iron mould of circumstance, and whose own proper muscles and soul had never had a chance of air to grow. A homely, saddened, uncouthly shaped face,—one that would be sure to go snubbed and unread through the world, to find at last some woman who would know its latent meaning, and worship it with the heat of passion which this country-girl had given. Withal, a cheerful, quizzical smile on the lips. Poor Martha's eyes filled, the moment she looked at that; and so she went back to her first years of married life, full of keen, relishing enjoyment, all coming from him, quiet, silent as he was,—remembering how her maddest freaks were indulged with that same odd, dry laugh. She stood alone now.
"And in these years I have grown used to being alone,"—standing up, stretching her arms suddenly above her head, and letting them fall again.
It was a lie: she knew that the tired sinking within her of body and soul was harder to bear now than the day he went away, and she weaker to bear it. If she could but lean her head on his breast for one moment, and feel him pat her hair with the old "Tut! tut! why, what ails my girl?" it would give her more strength than all her prayers. She couldn't think of herself as anything but a girl, when she remembered her husband: these years were nothing.
Her mouth grew drier and hotter, as she sat there looking into the face, polishing the glass with her hand, kissing it. "I'm so tired, Stephen!" she would whisper now and then. Only those who know the unuttered mysterious bond in the soul of a true wife and husband can comprehend what Martha Yarrow bore, when it was torn apart, and by no fault of hers. "God meant him for me," she sometimes said, savagely; "no man had a right to part us." She looked at the picture, feeling that he was purer than any baby she had nursed at her breast, nearer God. "It was his religion was to blame. That was the ruin of us all. I believe he never knew who the good God was; how could he?" thinking of his father, who used to sit in the chimney-corner,—one of those acrid doctrine-professors who sour the water of life into gall and vinegar before they dole it out to their children. She was glad she had told him her mind before they parted,—to what his teaching had brought his son. "I cut deep that day, and I thank God for it," she said, her face white.