第15章 MY TRIUMPHANT FINALE(2)

At length he thought the time had come for another sort of comfort."My friend," he said one day, "it is too plain to me now that you aredying.Write to the procurator and tell him so.In some cases men have been allowed to go home to die."A wild hope seized on poor Sigismund; he sat down to the little table in his cell and wrote a letter to the procurator--a letter which might almost have drawn tears from a flint.Again and again he passionately asserted his innocence, and begged to know on what evidence he was imprisoned.He began to think that he could die content if he might leave this terrible cell, might be a free agent once more, if only for a few days.At least hemight in that case clear his character, and convince Gertrude that his imprisonment had been all a hideous mistake; nay, he fancied that he might live through a journey to England and see her once again.

But the procurator would not let him be set free, and refused to believe that his case was really a serious one.

Sigismund's last hope left him.

The days and weeks dragged slowly on, and when, according to English reckoning, New Year's Eve arrived, he could scarcely believe that only seventeen weeks ago he had actually been with Gertrude, and that disgrace and imprisonment had seemed things that could never come near him, and death had been a far-away possibility, and life had been full of bliss.

As I watched him a strong desire seized me to revisit the scenes of which he was thinking, and I winged my way back to England, and soon found myself in the drowsy, respectable streets of Muddleton.

It was New Year's Eve, and I saw Mrs.O'Reilly preparing presents for her grandchildren, and talking, as she tied them up, of that dreadful Nihilist who had deceived them in the summer.I saw Lena Houghton, and Mr.Blackthorne, and Mrs.Milton-Cleave, kneeling in church on that Friday morning, praying that pity might be shown "upon all prisoners and captives, and all that are desolate or oppressed."It never occurred to them that they were responsible for the sufferings of one weary prisoner, or that his death would be laid at their door.

I flew to Dulminster, and saw Mrs.Selldon kneeling in the cathedral at the late evening service and rigorously examining herself as to the shortcomings of the dying year.She confessed many things in a vague, untroubled way; but had any one told her that she had cruelly wronged her neighbour, and helped to bring an innocent man to shame, and prison, and death, she would not have believed the accusation.

I sought out Mark Shrewsbury.He was at his chambers in Pump Court working away with his type-writer; he had a fancy for working the old year out and the new year in, and now he was in the full swing of that novel which had suggested itself to his mind when Mrs.Selldon described the rich and mysterious foreigner who had settled down at Ivy Cottage.

Most happily he laboured on, never dreaming that his careless words had doomed a fellow-man to a painful and lingering death; never dreaming that while his fingers flew to and fro over his dainty little keyboard, describing the clever doings of the unscrupulous foreigner, another man, the victim of his idle gossip, tapped dying messages on a dreary prison wall.

For the end had come.

Through the evening Sigismund rested wearily on his truckle-bed.He could not lie down because of his cough, and, since there were no extra pillows to prop him up, he had to rest his head and shoulders against the wall.There was a gas-burner in the tiny cell, and by its light he looked round the bare walls of his prison with a blank, hopeless, yet wistful gaze; there was the stool, there was the table, there were the clothes he should never wear again, there was the door through which his lifeless body would soon be carried.He looked at everything lingeringly, for he knew that this desolate prison was the last bit of the world he should ever see.

Presently the gas was turned out.

He sighed as he felt the darkness close in upon him, for he knew that his eyes would never again see light--knew that in this dark lonely cell he must lie and wait for death.And he was young and wished to live, and he was in love and longed most terribly for the presence of the woman he loved.

The awful desolateness of the cell was more than he could endure; he tried to think of his past life, he tried to live once again through those happy weeks with Gertrude; but always he came back to the aching misery of the present--the cold and the pain, and the darkness and the terrible solitude.