The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864

"Come to the fire, old fellow!" he said, huskily. "You're blue with cold. We used to have snows like this at home, eh?"

The man passed the lady with the quaint, shy bow that used to be habitual with him towards women, (he still used it to the jailer's wife,) and held his hands over the blaze. His brother followed him: his wife had never seen him so nervous or excited: he stood close to the convict, smoothing his coat on the shoulder, taking off his cap.

"Why, why! this cloth's too thin, even for summer; I—Oh, Stephen, these are hard times,—hard! But I mean to do something for you, God knows. Sit down, sit down, you're tired, boy," turning off, going to the window, his hands behind him,—coming back again. "We're going to help you, Judith and I."

Soulé did not see the look which the convict shot at the woman, when he spoke these words; but she did,—and knew, that, however her husband might contrive to deceive himself, he never would his brother. If Stephen Yarrow's soul went down to any deeper depth to-night, it would be conscious in its going. What manner of man was he? What was his wife, or long-ago home, or his old God, now, to him? It mattered to them: for, if he were not a tool, they were ruined. She stitched quietly at her soft floss and flannel. Soulé was sincere; let him explain what his wish was, himself; it would be wiser for her to be silent; this man, she remembered, had eyes that never understood a lie.

Yarrow did not sit down; his brother stood close, leaning his unsteady hand upon his arm.

"I knew you would not fail me, Stephen. To-morrow will be a turning-point in both our lives. Circumstances have conspired to help me in my plan."

He began to stammer. The other looked at him quietly, inquiringly.

"You remember what I told you on Tuesday?" more hastily. "I have dealt heavily in stocks lately; it needs one blow more, and our future is secure for life. Yours and mine, I mean,—yours and mine, Stephen. This paper old Frazier carries,—he Is going to New York with it. If I can keep it out of the market for a week, my speculation is assured,—I can realize half a million, at least. Frazier is an old man, weak: he crosses the Narrows to-morrow morning on horseback."

He stopped abruptly, playing with a shell on the mantel-shelf.

"I understand," in a dry voice; "you want him robbed; and my hands came at the right nick of time."

"Pish! you use coarse words. A man's brain must be distempered to call that robbery; the paper, as I said, is neither money nor its equivalent."

There was a silence of some moments.

"I must have it," his eye growing fierce. "You could take it and leave the man unhurt. I could have done it myself, but he's an old man, I want him left unhurt. If I had done it—Well," chewing his lips, "it would not have been convenient for him to have gone on with that story. He knows me. Is the affair quite plain now?"

Yarrow nodded slowly, looking in the fire.

"If I were not strong enough to-morrow, what then?"

"I will be with you,—near. I must have the paper. He is an old Shylock, after all," with a desperate carelessness. "His soul would not weigh heavily against me, if it were let out."

Yarrow passed his hand over his face; it was colorless. Yet he looked bewildered. The bare thought of murder was not clear to him yet.

"Drink some wine, Stephen," said his brother, pouring out a goblet for himself. "I carry my own drinking-apparatus. This Sherry"—

Yarrow tasted it, and put down the glass.

"I was cheated in it, eh?"

"Yes, you were."

"Your palate was always keener than mine. I"—

His mouth looked blue and cold under his whiskers: then they both stood vacantly silent, while the woman sewed.

"Tut! we will look at the matter practically, as business-men," said Soulé at last, affecting a gruff, hearty tone, and walking about,—but was silent there.

The convict did not answer. No sound but the rough wind without blowing the drifted snow and pebbles from the asphalt roof against the frosted panes, and the angry fire of bitumen within breaking into clefts of blue and scarlet flame, thrusting its jets of fierce light out from its cage: impatient, it may be, of this convict, this sickly, shrivelled bit of humanity standing there; wondering the nauseated life in his nostrils or soul claimed yet its share of God's breath. Society had taken the man like a root torn out of native unctuous soil, kept it in a damp cellar, hid out the breath and light. If after a while it withered away, whose fault was it? If there were no hand now to plant it again, do you look for it to grow rotten, or not? One would have said Soulé was a root that had been planted in fat, loamy ground, to look at him. There was a healthy, liberal, lazy life for you! Yet the winter sky looked gray and dumb when he passed the window, and the fire-light broke fiercest against his bluff figure going to and fro. No matter; something there that would have warmed your heart to him: something genial, careless, big-natured, from the loose red hair to the indolent, portly stride. "Who knows? A comfortable, true-hearted, merry clergyman,—a jolly farmer, with open house, and a bit of good racing-stock in the stable,—if bigotry in his boyhood, and this woman, had not crossed him. They had crossed him: there was not an atom of unpolluted nature left: you saw the taint in every syllable he spoke. Fresh and malignant to-night, when this tempted soul hung in the balance.

"We're letting the matter slip too long. Something must be decided upon. Stephen!" nervously, "wake up! You have forgotten our subject, I think."

"No," the bald head raised out of the coat-collar in which it had sunk. "Go on."

Soulé looked at him perplexed a moment. Was he dulled, or had he learned in those years to shut in looks and thoughts closer prisoners than himself?

"It is a mere question of time," he said, a little composed. "Frazier is an agent: shall this money accrue to me or to his employers? I have risked all on it. I must have it at any cost."

"At any cost?"

"At any," boldly. "Is it any easier for me to talk of that chance than you, Stephen?"

"No, John. Your hands are clean," with an exhausted look. "I know that. You had a kind Irish heart. What money you made with one hand you flung away with the other."

Soulé blushed like a woman.

"No matter," beating some dust off his boot. "But for Frazier,—I've talked that over with Judith, and—I don't value human life as you do: it may Lave been my residence in the South. It matters little how a man dies, so he lives right. This Frazier, if he dies to defend his package, would do a nobler deed than in any of his dime-scraping days. For me, my part is not robbery. The paper is neither specie nor a draft."

His tongue swung fluently now, for it had convinced himself.

"There is but a night left to decide. What will you do, Stephen?"

He put his hand on the green coat with its gaudy buttons, and leaned against his brother as they used to go arms over shoulders to school. Soulé's big throat was full of tears; he had never felt so full of sorrowful pity as in this the foulest purpose of his life. Unselfish it seemed to him. O God! what a hard life Stephen's had been! This would cure him: two or three sea-voyages, a winter in Florence, would freshen him a little, maybe,—but not much.

"Eh? What will you do, old fellow?" striking his shoulder. "This is the last night."

"I know that. I have been waiting for it all my life."

He put his red handkerchief up to his mouth to conceal the face, as if its meaning were growing too plain. Soulé looked at him fixedly a moment, then, taking him by the button, began tapping off his sentences on his breast.

"I'll state the case. I'll be plain. Stephen, you want food; you want clothes; you"—

"Is that all I want?" facing him.

The woman started, as she saw his face fully, and his look, for the first time. A quiet blue eye, unutterably kind and sad: a slow, compelling face, that would look on his life barely, day after day, year after year, never drowsing over its sore or pain until he had wrung its full meaning out to the last dregs.

"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"—

He paused. Even in this frothy-brained fellow, his religion or his doubt lay deeper than all. His face grew dark.

"I tell you, if there is one thing I loathe, it is the God and His day that were taught to me when I was a child: joyless, hard, cruel. Fire—humph!—and brimstone for all but a few hundred. I remember. Well, I don't know yet if there is any better," with a vague look. "A man shifts for himself in the next chance as well as now, I suppose. Did you believe what you preached, Stephen?" with an abrupt change. "God! how you used to writhe under it at first!"

"They forced me into it," said Yarrow. "I was only a boy. You remember that I was only a boy,—just out of the shop. The more uneducated a man was in our church-pulpit then, the better. I knew nothing, John," appealingly. "When I preached about foreordination and hell-fire, it was in coarse slang: I knew that. I used to think there might be a different God and books and another life farther out in the world, if I could only get at it. I never was strong, and they had forced me into it; and when you came to me to help you with your plan, I wanted to get out, and"—

"You did help me,"—chafing the limp fingers. "That was my first start, that Pesson note. I owe that to you, Stephen."

"I have paid for it," looking him steadily in the eye, some unexpected manliness rising up, making his tone bitter and marrowy. "I paid for it. But no matter for that. But now you come again. I have had time to think over these things in yonder, John."

Soulé dropped his hand, drew back, and was silent a moment.

"Let it be so. But did you think what you would do, if you refused your aid to me? Have you found work? or a God to preach?"

Something in these last words took Yarrow's sudden strength away. He did not answer for a moment.

"Work?" feebly. "No,—I haven't heard of any work. As for a God"—

"Well, then, what are your purposes?" coldly.

Another silence.

"I don't know. I never was worth much," he gasped out at last, stooping, and pulling at his shoestrings.

"And now"—said Soulé.

"There's no need for you to say that!" with a sharp cry. "I don't forget that I have slipped,—that it's too late,—I don't forget."

His hands jerked at his coat-fronts in a wild, dazed way.

"Stephen!"

The woman rose, and let in the air.

"I thank you. I'm not sick."

Soulé turned away. He could not meet the look on the pinched convict-face,—the soul of the man crying out for God or his brother, something to help. There was a silence for a few moments.

"You will come with me, Stephen," quietly: then, after a pause, "It is for life. There is but little time left to decide."

Was there no help? Had the true God no messenger? The winter-wind blowing through the window filled with fine frost wet his face, lifted the smothering off his lungs. His eyes grew clear, as his full sense returned after a while: seeing only at first, it so happened, the fire in its square frame; and thinking only of that, as the mind always drowsily absorbs the nearest trifle after a spasm of pain. A bed of pale red coals now, furred over with white and pearl-colored ashes. It was a long time since he had seen any open fire,—years, he believed. Where was it that there had been a fire just like that, with the ashes like moss over the heat,—and on a night in winter, too, the wind rattling the panes? Where was it? While Soulé stood waiting for his answer, his mind was drifting back, like that of a man in his dotage, through its dull, muddy thoughts, after that one silly memory. He struck on it at last. A year or two after he was married. In the bedroom. Martha was sitting by the fire, with the old yellow dog beside her: she was trying to ride the baby on his neck,—he was the clumsiest brute! He came in and stopped to see the fun; he noticed the fire then, how cozy and warm it all was: outside it was hailing, a gust shaking the house. He had been doing a bit of carpentering,—he did like to go back to the old trade! This was a wicker chair for the baby,—he had made it in the stable for a surprise: the girl always liked surprises and such nonsense. He put it down with a flourish, and he remembered how she laughed, and Ready growled, and how he and she both got on their knees to seat the youngster in, and tie him with his bandanna handkerchief. So silly that all was! When they were on the floor there, and had Master Jem fastened in, be remembered how she suddenly turned, and put her arms about his neck, as shyly as when they were first married, and kissed him. "Only God knows how good you are to me, Stephen," she said. There were tears in her eyes.—Yarrow passed his hand over his forehead. Did ever a thought come into your mind like a fresh, clean air into a stove-heated, foul room? or like the first hearty, living call of Greatheart through the dungeons of Giant Despair?

"You do not answer me, Stephen?" said his brother. "You will go with me?"

Yarrow's head was more erect, his eyes less glazed.

"It may be. The chance for me's over in the world, I think. I may as well serve you. And yet"—

"What?"

"Give me time to think. I want out-of-doors. It's close here. I'll meet you in the morning."

Soulé caught his wife's uneasy glance.

"What is this, Stephen?"

"Nothing," looking dully out into the night.

"Then"—

"There's some you said were dead,"—as if no one were speaking, with the same dull look. "Or lost: I think they're not dead. If there might be a chance yet! If I could but see Martha and the little chaps, it would save me, John Yarrow, no matter what they'd learned to think of me. They're mine,—my little chaps. She said the boys should never know. She said that of her own free will."

"Is it likely she could keep her word?" said Soulé, sneeringly.

"Why, why, she loved me, John,"—a moist color and smile coming out on his face. "There's a little thing I minded just now that—Yes, Martha kept her word."

He tapped with his fingers thoughtfully on the mantel-shelf, the smile lingering yet on his face. The woman's woollen sewing fell from her hand, and she spoke for the first time. Her tone had a harsh, metallic twang in it: Yarrow turned curiously, as he heard it.

"What could they be to you, if you found them? They have forgotten you. In five years they have not sent you a message."

"No,—I know, Madam."

Even that did not hurt him. His face kindled slowly,—still turned to the fire, as if it were telling him some old story: looking to her at last, steadfast and manly, like a man who has healthy common-sense dominant in his head, and an unselfish love at work in his heart. Such a one is not far from the kingdom of heaven.

"It seems to me as if there might be a chance—yet. It's a long time. But Martha loved me, Madam. You don't know—I think I'll go, John. It's close here, 's I said. I'll meet you at the far bridge by dawn, and let you know."

"It is your only chance," said Soulé, roughly, as he followed him to the door.

He was a ruined man, if he were balked in this.

"You do not know how the world meets a returned felon, Stephen; you"—

"Let me go," feebly, putting his hand up to his chin in the old fashion.

"I think I know that. I—I've thought of that a good deal. But it seemed to me as if there might be a chance"; and so, without a word of farewell, went stumbling down the stairs.

He had given a wistful look at the fire, as he turned away. Perhaps that would comfort him. God surely has "many voices in the world, and none of them is without its signification."

An hour before dawn, Yarrow found the place in which he had appointed to meet his brother. The night had been dark, hailing at intervals; he had gone tramping up and down the hills and stubble-fields, through snow and half-frozen mud-gullies, hardly conscious of what he did. The night seemed long to him now, looking back. He found a burnt sycamore-stump and got up on it, shivered awhile, felt his shirt, which was wet to the skin, then took off his shoes and cleared the lumps of slush out of them. There was something horrible to him in this unbroken silence and dark and wet cold: he had been in his hot cell so long, the frost stung him differently from other men, the icy thaw was wetter. It was a narrow cut in the hills where he was, a bridle-road leading back and running zigzag for some miles until it returned to the railroad-track. A lonely, unfrequented place: Frazier would take this by-path; Soulé had chosen it well to meet him. There was a rickety bridge crossing a hill-stream a few rods beyond. Yarrow pushed the dripping cap off his forehead, and looked around. No light nor life on any side: even in the heavens yawned that breathless, uncolored silence that precedes a winter's dawn. He could see the Ohio through the gully: why, it used to be a broad, full-breasted river, glancing all over with light, loaded with steamers and rafts going down to the Mississippi. He had gone down once, rafting, with lumber, and a jolly three weeks' float they had of it. Now it was a solid, shapeless mass of blocks of ice and mud. Winter? yes, but the world was altered somehow, the very river seemed struck with death. His teeth chattered; he began to try to rub some warmth into his rheumatic legs and arms; tried to bring back the fancy of last night about Martha and the fire. But that was a long way off: there were all these years' mastering memories to fade it out, you know, and besides, a diseased habit of desponding. The world was wide to him, cowering out from a cell: where were Martha and the little chaps lost in it? John said they were dead. Where should he turn now? There was an aguish pain in his spine that blinded him: since yesterday he had eaten nothing,—he had no money to buy a meal; he was a felon,—who would give him work? "There's some things certain in the world," he muttered.

"That was silly last night,—silly. And yet,—if there could have been a chance!"

He looked up steadily into the sickly, discolored sky: nothing there but the fog from these swamps. He had not wished so much that he could hear of Martha and the children, when he looked up, as of something else that he needed more. Even the foulest and most careless soul that God ever made has some moments when it grows homesick, conscious of the awful vacuum below its life, the Eternal Arm not being there. Yarrow was neither foul nor careless. All his life, most in those years in the prison, he had been hungry for Something to rest on, to own him. Sometimes, when his evil behavior had seemed vilest to him, he had felt himself trembling on the verge of a great forgiveness. But he could see so little of the sky in the cell there,—only that three-cornered patch: he had a fancy, that, if once he were out in the world that He made,—in the free air,—that, if there were a God, he would find Him out. He had not found Him.

He sat on the stump awhile, his hands over his eyes, then got down slowly, buttoning his soggy waistcoat and coat.

"I don't see as there's a chance," he said, dully. "I was a fool to think there was any better God than the one that"—digging his toe into the frozen pools. "It's all ruled. I'm not one of the elect."

That was all. After that, he stood waiting for his brother.

"I'll help him. He's the best I know."

Even the faint sigh choked before it rose to his lips,—both manhood and hope were so dead with inanition; yet a life's failure went in it.

While he stood waiting, Martha Yarrow sat by her kitchen-fire crying to God to help him; but He knew what things were needed before she asked Him.

Soulé, with his gun and game-bag, had been coursing over the hills three miles back, since four o'clock. He had bagged a squirrel or two, enough to suffice for his morning's work, and now, his piece unloaded, came stealthily towards the place of rendezvous. He had little hope that Stephen would help him: he had made up his mind to go through the affair alone. If he did it, that involved—Pah! what was in a word? Men died every day. He had quite resolved: Judith and he had talked the matter over all night. But if Frazier were a younger man, and could fight for it! Perhaps he was armed: Soulé's face flashed: he stooped and broke the trigger of his gun, and then went on with a much less heavy step. They would be more even now. He wanted to reach the bridge by dawn, and meet his brother. If he refused to help him, he would send him away, and wait for Frazier alone. About nine o'clock he might expect him.

Frazier, however, had changed his plan. He told Starr the night before, that, as M. Soulé would not breakfast with him, he had concluded to rise early, and be off by dawn. "If there's nothing to be done about the Miami shares, there is no use wasting time here," he thought. So, while Stephen Yarrow waited near the bridge, the smoke was curling out of the kitchen-chimney where the cook was making ready the cashier's beefsteak, and the old man was crawling out of bed. He could hear Starr's children in the room overhead making an uproar over their stockings. "Christmas morning, by the way! I must take some knick-knack back to Totty." (As if his trunk were not always filled with things for Totty, and his shirts crammed into the lid, when he came home!) "Something for mother, too," as he pulled on his socks. "Gloves, now, hey? A dozen pair. I wish I had asked Madame Soulé what size she wore, last night. Their hands are about the same size. Mother always had a tidy little paw. So will Totty, eh?" And so finished dressing, thinking Soulé had a neat little wife, but insipid.

So Christmas morning came to all of them, the day when, a long time ago, One who had made a good happy world came back to find and save that which was lost in it. In these few hundred years had He forgotten the way of finding?

Stephen Yarrow had fallen into an uneasy doze by the road-side. He had done with thinking, when he said, "I'll go with John." The way through life seemed to open clear, exactly the same as it had been before. There was an end of it. There might have been a chance, but there was none. He drowsed off into a brutish slumber. Something like a kiss woke him. It was only the morning air. A clear, sweet-breathed dawn, as we said, that seemed somehow to have caught a scent of far-off harvest-farms, in lands where it was not winter. Warm brown clouds yonder with a glow like wine in them, the splendor of the coming day hinting of itself through.