The Bondboy

by Ogden, George W

  During her days she watched for him, straining her eyes up and down the dust-white road. At night her cheek burned upon her pillow, and her tears ran down, yearning for the man who had her heart’s love in his keeping and seemed unworthy of the trust.

  At such times her anger would flame hot against Joe. If he had not come into her affairs and muddled them, like a calf in a kitchen, all of this uncertainty and longing would have been spared her. And it would be like the fool now, the miserable, bleating bull-calf, to turn back on his word and betray her. In that case, what should she do? Bow her head, meekly, and bear him out? She did not think so. There was little chance that anybody would credit Joe if he should turn now on his own evidence, less if she should maintain that his first version of the tragedy was true. For what he had done by his impertinent meddling between her and Morgan he deserved to suffer. He must grin and bear it now, said she.

  Besides this feeling of revenge on Joe’s luckless head, Ollie had her reasons of selfishness and security for desiring him out of the way. With him in prison for a long time–people said it would be for life–the secret of her indiscretion with Morgan would be safe. And then, if Morgan never came back, perhaps another.

  But she recoiled from the thought that they might hang Joe for the murder of Isom. She did not want him hung, for through her gathering cloud of blame for his too faithful guardianship of his master’s house, she had gleams of tenderness and gratitude for him. She could not help comparing him with Morgan in such moments of softness. Morgan had let that boy drive him away; he seemed to have gone with such a terror of him that he never had looked back. Joe, on the other hand, had stood by her through the storm. No, she did not want them to hang Joe, but it would be quite easy and comfortable with him out of the way for a long, long time.

  Public opinion was framing toward giving her the relief that she desired. If anybody suspected that Ollie was concerned in her husband’s death, it was some remote person whose opinion did not affect the public mind. The current belief was that Joe alone was to blame.

  No matter how severe the world may be upon a woman after she is down in the mire, there is no denying that it is reluctant to tumble her from her eminence and throw her there. A woman will find more champions than detractors in the face of the most serious charge; especially a young and pretty one, or one whose life has been such as to shape sympathy for her in itself.

  All her neighbors knew that Isom’s wife had suffered. That year of penance in her life brought Ollie before them in a situation which was an argument and plea for their sympathy and support.

  In spite, then, of the coroner’s attempt at the inquest to drag Ollie into the tragedy, and to give foundation for his shrewd suspicion that there had been something between Isom’s wife and bondman which the husband was unaware of, no sensation nor scandal had come of that. The case was widely talked of, and it was the hope of every voter in the county that he would be drawn on the jury to try the boy accused of the murder. Even the busiest farmers began to plan their affairs so they would have at least one day to spare to attend the trial at its most interesting point.

  The date set for the trial was approaching, and so was election day. The prosecuting attorney, being up for reelection, hadn’t time, at that busy hour, to try a homicide case. He had to make speeches, and bestir himself to save his valuable services to the state. The man penned in jail, growing thin of cheek and lank of limb, could wait. There would be other homicide cases, but there never would be another prosecuting attorney so valuable as that one offering himself, and his young ambitions, on the altar of public service. That was according to his view. So he notified Hammer that the state would not be ready for trial on the day set.

  This pleased Hammer well enough, for the greater the delay the wider the notoriety of the case would spread, the larger his audience would be. By mutual agreement, the case was put over for one month.

  Joe protested against this delay in vain. Hammer said that they would profit by it, as the ferment of the public mind would settle meantime, and prejudice would not be so sharp. He talked a great deal about “character witnesses,” which Joe couldn’t see the need of, and took down the names of all the people whom Joe could name as having known him all his life. Then Hammer went his way, to make speeches in the campaign in support of the worthy sheriff.

  So Joe found himself with another month ahead of him before he could even hope to walk out into the sun again.

  Jail was wearing on him. The disgrace of it was torture to his sensitive mind, without the physical chafing to pull him down to bones. Those two weeks had taken off his frame a great deal of the flesh that he had gained during the summer. His gauntness was more pronounced than it ever had been before.

  Mrs. Newbolt walked in twice a week to see him, carrying with her a basket of biscuits and other homely things dear to her son’s palate. All of which the sheriff speared with knitting-needles, and tried on various domestic animals, to make certain that the Widow Newbolt did not cheat the gallows out of its due by concealing saws in pies, or introducing poison to her hopeless offspring in boiled eggs.

  But all of her tempting relishes, or such of them, at least, as reached Joe, were powerless to fill his hollow cheeks, growing thinner and paler day by day. He could not eat with relish, he could not sleep with peace. If it had not been for the new light that Alice Price had brought into his life, he must have burned his young heart to ashes in his restiveness.

  Twice again the colonel and Alice had visited Joe, once to carry to him the books for which he had expressed a desire, and again to bring the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which Alice herself had gone after to Judge Maxwell’s house. Each time Joe fancied that she left a radiance behind her that brightened and warmed his cell for days.

  Nobody else in the town troubled himself about the prisoner’s welfare, for nobody else knew him. Two of the ministers had called at the jail in the first days of Joe’s incarceration, in a sort of urging-to-penitence state of mind, just as if they were assured of Joe’s guilt by reason of his very obscurity. Joe had told them that he had a religion of his own which seemed to fill all present needs, and did not want to make any change. He was respectful, but lofty in his bearing. So they put him down as a stiff-necked son of Belial, and went away, leaving him to save himself if he thought he was equal to the task, in a manner of challenge.

  In the face of this clerical abandonment, people wondered over the deep interest that Colonel Price and his daughter seemed to have in the Widow Newbolt’s son, who had neither pride of family nor of possessions to recommend him.

  Joe had not yet brought himself to the belief that it was necessary to take his lawyer into his confidence, although Hammer had made it unfeelingly plain to him that the withholding of any vital fact would be fatal to his cause. Although Joe was beginning to experience a deep and disquieting concern about the outcome of the trial, he was disposed to give Morgan an honest man’s chance to come forward and take his share of it upon himself. If he should do that, then Joe felt that he would be morally free to disclose all that took place in the kitchen on the night Isom lost his life.

  In case that Morgan did not come, or that he had gone beyond the reach of Hammer or anybody else to fetch him back, then there would not be one word of evidence to uphold him, or justify his seemingly ridiculous stand of reticence. Yet, perhaps Morgan was waiting until the trial day; perhaps he knew all about it, and would appear in time. So argued Joe, in his great desire to be just to everybody.

  He reviewed the matter in this wise with ceaseless repetition, always arriving at this same end, from which he drew the comfort of hope. Perhaps Morgan would come in time. At any event, he would wait until the last minute of the last hour, and give him a man’s chance to do what was honorable and fair.

  The talkative horse-thief had been tried and condemned, and had gone his cheerful way to the penitentiary to serve three years. Before leaving he had taken pains to sound again his forecast of what was waiting Joe “do
wn the river,” in case they did not give him the “quick and painless.” He never had forgiven Joe his unwillingness to gossip with him in jail. The fellow’s vindictiveness was evident in the sneering delight that he took on his last night in jail in calling Joe out of his sleep, or pretended sleep, to hear his description of the terrors waiting a man condemned to prison for life.

  Now that he was gone, Joe felt that his words lived after him, like mold upon the walls, or a chilling damp between the stones. The recollection of them could not be denied his abnormally sharpened senses, nor the undoubted truth of their terrifying picture shut out of his imagination by any door of reasoning that he had the strength to close. Condemnation to prison would mean the suspension of all his young hopes and healthy desires; it would bring him to the end of his activities in the world as suddenly as death. Considering ambition, love, happiness, men in prison were already dead. They lived only in their faculty for suffering.

  Would Morgan come to save him from that fate? That was his sole speculation upon a solution of his pressing trouble. Without Morgan, Joe did not consider any other way.

  Colonel Price had received lately a commission for a corn picture from a St. Louis hotel, upon which he was working without pause. He had reached that state of exalted certainty in relation to corn that he never was obliged to put aside his colors and wait the charge of inspiration. His inspirational tide always was setting in when corn was the subject. Work with the colonel in such case was a matter of daylight.

  On account of the order, the colonel had no time for Joe, for art with him, especially corn art, was above the worries and concerns of all men. He did not forget the prisoner in the white heat of his commission. For several days he had it in his mind to ask Alice to visit him, and carry to him the assurance of the continuance of the family interest and regard. But it was an unconventional thing to request of a young lady; a week slipped past before the colonel realized it while he temporized in his mind.

  At last he approached it circuitously and with a great deal of diplomatic concealment of his purpose, leaving ample room for retreat without unmasking his intention, in case he should discern indications of unwillingness.

  By that time the election was over and the country regularly insured against anarchy, devastation, and ruin for two years longer. The prosecuting attorney and the sheriff had been reelected; the machinery of the law was ready to turn at the grist.

  The colonel was pleased to see that Alice seconded him in his admission that they had been treating Joe Newbolt shamefully. Of course the sheriff was partly to blame for that, having set himself up with metropolitan importance, now that he was secure in office. He had put aside Wednesday as the one day of the week on which visitors, other than relatives or counsel of prisoners, would be permitted to enter the jail.

  It chanced to be a Wednesday morning when the colonel got around to it finally, and they agreed heartily and warmly that somebody ought to go and carry a little gleam of cheer and encouragement to Joe. The colonel looked at his unfinished picture, then at the mellow light of the autumn day, so much like the soul of corn itself, and then at Alice. He lifted his eyebrows and waved his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “Never mind,” said she; “you go ahead with the picture; I’ll go alone.”

  The colonel blessed her, and turned to his picture with a great sigh of relief. Alice left him to prepare for her visit, a flutter of eagerness in her heart, a feeling of timid nervousness which was unaccountable and strange.

  She was not accustomed to trembling at the thought of meeting young men. Usually she went forward to the ordeal with a smile, which the victim would not have gathered a great deal of pleasure from, in most cases, if he had been able to read, for he would have seen her appraisement of him on her lips. There was none of this amusing measurement of Joe, no sounding of his shallows with her quick perception like a sunbeam finding the pebbles in the bottom of a brook. There was something in his presence which seemed like a cool wind on the forehead, palpable, yet profound from the mystery of its source.

  She had been surprised by the depth of this unpromising subject, to whom she had turned at first out of pity for his mother. The latent beauties of his rugged mind, full of the stately poetry of the old Hebrew chronicles, had begun to unfold to her sympathetic perception in the three visits she had made in her father’s company. Each visit had brought some new wonder from that crude storehouse of his mind, where Joe had been hoarding quaint treasures all his lonely, companionless years.

  And Joe, even in his confinement, felt that he was free in a larger sense than he ever had been before. He was shaking out his wings and beginning to live understandingly and understood. It was beyond him to believe it sometimes; beyond him always to grasp the reality of Alice Price, and her friendship for one so near the dust as he.

  What was there about the poor folks’ boy, bound out but yesterday to Isom Chase, and still bound to his estate under the terms of his articles? What was there in him to reach out and touch the sympathies of this beautiful young woman, who came to him with the scent of violets in her hair? Others had despised him for his poverty, and fastened a name upon him which was in itself a reproach. And still misunderstanding, they had carried him off to prison, charged with a dark and hideous crime. Now this light had come to him in his despair, like the beam of that white star above the Judean plains. Like that star, she would stand far off to guide him, and exalt his soul by its strivings to attain her level. There their relations must cease. He might yearn his heart away in the gulf that lay between them, and stretch out his empty hands for evermore, never to feel its nearer warmth upon his breast. He was the poor folks’ boy.

  There was a wan sun on the day she came alone to the jail, a day so long remembered by Joe and held by him so dear. A solemn wind was roaming the tree-tops outside his cell window; the branches stood bleak and bare against the mottled sky.

  Alice wore a dress of some soft gray material, which seemed to embrace her in warm comfort, and reveal her in a new and sprightly loveliness. Her rippled hair was free upon her temples, her ear peeped out from beneath it with a roguish tint upon it, as if it waited to be kissed, and blushed for its own temerity. A gay little highland bonnet rode the brown billows of her abundant hair, saucy and bold as a corsair, with one bright little feather at its prow. Perhaps it was no more than a goose quill, or a cock’s plume dipped in dye, but to Joe it seemed as glorious as if it had been plucked from the fairest wing in the gardens of paradise.

  The marvel of it came over Joe again as he stood close against the bars to greet her. She, so rare and fine, so genteel and fair, caring enough for him and his unpromising fate to put aside the joyous business of her unhampered life and seek him in that melancholy place. It seemed a dream, yet she was there, her delicate dark brows lifted questioningly, as if uncertain that he would approve her unconventional adventure, a smile in the depths of her serene, frank eyes. Her cheeks were glowing from the sparks of morning, and her ungloved hand was reaching out to meet him.

  He clasped it, and welcomed her with joy that he could not have simulated any more than he could have hidden. There was a tremor in his voice; a hot sweep of blood flamed in his face like a confession of his secret soul.

  “I never saw you look so tall,” said he slowly, measuring her with adoring eyes.

  “Maybe it’s the dress,” said she, looking herself over with a little expressive sweep of the hands, as if to put all the blame on that innocent nun-gray gown, if there was blame to be borne.

  She wore a little bunch of mignonette upon her breast, just at the point where the slashing of her bodice ended, and the gray gave way to a wedge of virginal white, as if her sempstress had started to lay bare her heart. The flowers quivered as from some internal agitation, nestling their pale gold spikes against their lovely bed.

  “I don’t know that it’s the dress,” said he, “but you do look taller than usual, it seems to me.”

  She laughed, as if she found humo
r in his solemn repetition of such a trivial discovery.

  “Well, I can’t help being tall,” she said. “How tall would you have a lady grow? How tall do you think one ought to be?”

  “‘As high as my heart,’” said Joe, remembering Orlando’s words.

  The color deepened in her cheeks; she caught her breath with a little “Oh!”

  She wondered what sprout of blue-blooded and true-blooded nobility in Shelbyville there was capable of turning a reply like that without straining for it more than that pale cavalier with his worn clothing hanging loose upon his bony frame. When she ventured to lift her eyes to his face, she found him grasping a bar of the cell door with one hand, as if he would tear it from its frame. His gaze was fixed upon the high window, he did not turn. She felt that he was struggling with himself that moment, but whether to drive to speech or to withhold it, she could not tell.

  “I wish I could go out there and run about five miles this morning,” he sighed.

  She gave him sigh for sigh, feeling that something was lost. He had not striven with himself merely to say that. But from there they went on to talk of his coming trial, and to expose the mutual hope that no further excuse would be advanced for its continuance. He seemed to be certain that the trial would see an end of his difficulty, and she trembled to contemplate any other outcome.

  So they stood and talked, and her face was glowing and her eyes were bright.

  “Your cheeks are as red as bitter-sweet,” said he.

  “There was frost last night,” she laughed, “and the cool wind makes my face burn.”

  “I know just how it feels,” said he, looking again toward the window with pathetic wistfulness, the hunger of old longings in his eyes.

  “It will not be long now until you are free,” she said in low voice of sympathy.

  He was still looking at the brown branches of the bare elm, now palely touched with the cloud-filtered autumn sun.

  “I know where there’s lots of it,” said he, as if to himself, “out in the hills. It loves to ramble over scrub-oak in the open places where there’s plenty of sun. I used to pick armloads of it the last year I went to school and carry it to the teacher. She liked to decorate the room with it.”