"All you want? Clothing? food?" stammered Soulé,—something in the face having stopped his garrulous breath. "I did not say that, Stephen."
The wind struck sharper on the rattling panes; the yellow and brown heats grew deeper. One saw how it was then. No beggar turned from God so empty-handed as this man to-day. His place in the world slipped: his chance gone: sick, sinking; his brain mad for knowledge: his hands stretched out for work: no man to give it to him: whatever God he had lost to him: the thief's smell, he thought, on every breath he drew, every rag of clothes he wore. Hundreds of convicts leave our prison-doors with souls as hungry and near death as this.
"I have lost something—since I went in there," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "I do not think it will ever come back."
"No?"
Soulé put his big hand to his face mechanically.
"Don't say that, boy! I know—The world has gone on, it has left you behind—You"—
He choked,—could not go on: he would have put half the strength and life in himself into Yarrow's lank little body that moment, if he could. There was a something else lost, different from all these, of which they both thought, but they did not speak of it. The convict looked out into the night. Beyond the square patch of window and that near dark, how full the world was of happy homes getting ready for Christmas! children and happy wives! Soulé understood.
"I don't say I can bring you back what you have lost, Stephen. I offer you the best I can. You're not an old man,—barely thirty: you must have years to acquire fresh bone and muscle. Set your brain to work, meanwhile. Give it a chance."
"It never had one," said the convict, with a queer, faint smile.
"Hillo! that looks like old times!" brightening up. "No, it never had. Do you think I forget our alley-house with its three rooms? the carpentering by day, and the arithmetic by night? the sweltering, sultry Sunday mornings in church, and the afternoons sniffling over the catechism among the rain-butts in the back-yard? Do you remember the preachers, the travelling agents, that put up with us? how they snarled at other churches, and helped themselves out of the shop, as if to be a man of God implied a mean beggar? I don't say my father was a hypocrite when he made you a colporteur, and so one of them; but"—