"It is well," was the echo.
The people had, indeed, settled into their usual quiet mode of life again with surprising readiness, as often happens to those who, giving themselves entirely up to an excitement, exhaust its force the sooner. The conviction and sentence of Mr. Schöninger had not only given them a satisfying sense of justice vindicated, but had impressed them with awe. The suddenness of his fall, when they had leisure to contemplate its accomplishment, was startling. But a few weeks before, he had walked their streets with a step as proud as the proudest, and there was not one among them, whatever his prejudices, who was not pleased to receive his salutation; in a few months longer—months of misery and disgrace—he would be called on to suffer the extreme penalty of the law.
Some of them remembered, too, when all was over, the defence the prisoner had made, if defence it could be called, when he was permitted to speak for himself. They were bitter words, full of fierce and haughty defiance and denunciation and at the time their sole effect had been to provoke still further against him the popular rage; but, for some reason, there was a thrilling pathos in the recollection of them, perhaps because they had been uttered in vain, and because they showed with what horror he contemplated his impending doom.
"You seek my destruction because I am a Jew, not because I am a criminal," he exclaimed; "and you condemn me without proof. But do not flatter yourselves that I shall perish so. Do not believe that I shall fall a victim to your insane and presumptuous bigotry. It may triumph for a time, but the triumph will be short."
Not a very pleasant sort of address to be listened to by a judge who had tried to be impartial, and meant to be honest, nor to a jury who were fully convinced of the speaker's guilt, and who had moreover, as juries are likely to have, a more than judicial sense of their own dignity. Yet, for all that, there was not one of them who would have liked to face again those flashing eyes and that white hand pointing like a flame where his words should fall. They were rather afraid of the man, and looked with equal uneasiness toward the execution of his sentence and the possibility of rescue or escape, or of revenge even, which he had seemed to threaten.
For the present, however, the prison was strong and well guarded, and the convict, being in solitary confinement, had no means of communicating with any friends he might have outside. He was still in Crichton, the state prison being near the city jail; and still, if he chose, he could look out from his grated window and see the Christ in air stretching out arms of loving invitation to him.
TO BE CONTINUED.
FOOTNOTES:
[274] The beasts of prey have triumphed, and the birds have been driven away.