The bolts were drawn back, the door grated on its hinges, and the priest stepped into the cell. He scarcely took any notice of the prisoner, who sat looking at him something as a newly-caged lion may look when first his keeper ventures into the cage, but watched the guard while he locked the door again, and listened to the sound of his retreating steps as they echoed along the corridor.
The prisoner's voice, deep and harsh, demanded his attention before he turned to him. “May I ask, sir, the meaning of this intrusion?”
F. Chevreuse almost started at the sound. His mind had been so occupied by sorrowful and pathetic images, and he had, moreover, so associated Mr. Schöninger with thoughts of joy and freedom, that the concentrated bitterness of those tones smote him discordantly. He had for the time forgotten that the prisoner could not even suspect that his visitor was one who brought good tidings. His surprise was so [pg 482] great, therefore, at this repelling question, that for a moment he looked at the speaker attentively without replying, and the look itself held him yet a moment longer silent.
Mr. Schöninger had changed terribly. It was as though you should take some marble statue of a superb heathen deity, and carve down the contours, sharpen the lines without changing them, carefully, with mallet and chisel, gnaw away the flesh from muscle and bone, and cut in the lines of anger, impatience, and hatred, and of an intense and corroding bitterness. Then, if the statue could be made hollow, and filled with a fire which should glow through the thin casing till it seemed at times on the point of melting it quite, and bursting out in a destroying flame, you would have some semblance of what this man had become after seven months of imprisonment.
F. Chevreuse was terrified. “Mr. Schöninger!” he exclaimed, “I have come to bring you liberty. Do not look so at me! Try to forgive the wrong that has been done you. All shall be righted. The criminal has confessed, and you are to go free as soon as the necessary steps shall be taken.”
Not a gleam of pleasure softened the prisoner's face. Only his brows darkened over the piercing eyes he fixed on his visitor. “So Mr. Benton has betrayed me!” he said in a low voice that expressed more of rage and threatening than any outcry could have done.
“I do not know anything of your lawyer, nor have any communication with him,” the priest replied. “I do not know what you mean by betrayal. I repeat, I have come to bring you good news. Do not you understand?” He began to fear that Mr. Schöninger had lost his reason. “Your innocence is established. You are known, or will at once be known, to have been greatly wronged.”
“It is a trick!” the prisoner exclaimed passionately. “Benton has either betrayed me or bungled, and you think to offer me as a gift—for which I am to be grateful, and merciful too—what I have won for myself. I will not take liberty from your hands!” He started up, and, with a gesture of the hand, seemed to fling the priest's offer from him. “Do you fancy, sir, that I have been idle here? Does a man sleep in hell? Did you fancy that I was going to wait for justice to come to me? No! I was shut into a cage; but I am not the sort of animal who can be tamed and made to play tricks for my keeper. I have been busy while the world forgot me.”
“I did not forget you,” hastily interposed the priest. “And others also have tried.”
“Tried!” echoed the prisoner scornfully. “Sir, when a clay-bank falls on a poor workman, everybody runs to the rescue. Not a minute is lost. People rush in haste to dig him out before he is dead. That you call humanity. You do not even dignify it by the name of charity. A man would be a brute to do otherwise than help in such a case. But here am I, overwhelmed with a mountain of wrong and disgrace, shut in a cage that is changing me into a madman, and people pause to consider; they are politic, they are careful not to soil their fingers or inconvenience their friends in giving me liberty. I am a Jew, and, therefore, out of the pale of your charity. But, Jew though I am, priest, I take the side of the [pg 483] Christ you pretend to adore against your accursed and hypocritical Christians. If your doctrines were true, still I am a better Christian than any of those who have believed me guilty.”