“Don’t take it so hard, doctor,” begged the nurse. “You have been through a harrowing experience and your face shows it now. But in a short time—” The lie did not come easily, and her tongue faltered.
“Never mind that,” whispered Blalock. “It doesn’t matter now. Send for Stevenson, please.”
The chairman of the Prison Commission came without delay. Compelling himself to conceal the repulsion he felt at sight of the broken man upon the bed, he bustled in with forced pleasantries.
“Stevenson,” said Blalock when finally the other had taken a chair and the nurse had withdrawn. “I have something to tell you. That day I went into the dark cell—”
“Now, now, old man,” soothed Stevenson, laying a restraining hand upon the other’s arm. “Don’t let’s talk about that. We abolished it that very day. Why bring up that awful experience of yours? No one knows about it but the commission, the warden and your doctor and nurse here. We all are pledged not to talk about it, and the newspapers didn’t have a line except that you were taken ill. Let the past take care of itself, Blalock, old man, and let us talk of other things.”
A flash of the old will power shone in the sick man’s eyes.
“No,” he said firmly. “No, Stevenson, the past cannot take care of itself. Bend closer, Stevenson, I must tell you something, and it seems I’m not strong enough yet to talk out loud.
“That day I so boastfully demanded that I be locked up in ‘solitary.’ I thought I knew myself and my will power. I believed that I had such control over my mind and my body that I could defy any torture man might devise, without quailing—despite the knowledge that my conscience was not the lily-white thing I had led others to believe it was. For, Stevenson, my conscience was black—as black as hell! It held the knowledge of a great sin on my part, a huge wrong that had been done another.
“But I had stifled it by my will power until I believed it a thing that was dead, that could never throw off the bondage to which I had doomed it, and arise and accuse me. It was to prove that I was superior to it that I deliberately chose to be locked up with it where, alone with my thoughts, I could prove myself the master, once for all.
“For Martin Ellis had shaken my confidence. Where before I had been certain I was doubtful, I wanted to prove him a liar and at the same time satisfy myself that I was a free man and not the galley slave of that thing which we call a guilty conscience.