“There you show the cautious common-sense which
belongs rarely to lovers of verse and petticoat interest.
What have you done with your guitar?”
“I do not pace the roads with that instrument:
it is forwarded to me from town to town under a borrowed
name, together with other raiment that this, should
I have cause to drop my character of wandering minstrel.”
The two men here exchanged a cordial shake of the
hand. And as the minstrel went his way along
the river-side, his voice in chanting seemed to lend
to the wavelets a livelier murmur, to the reeds a less
plaintive sigh.
IN his room, solitary and brooding, sat the defeated
hero of a hundred fights. It was now twilight;
but the shutters had been partially closed all day,
in order to exclude the sun, which had never before
been unwelcome to Tom Bowles, and they still remained
so, making the twilight doubly twilight, till the
harvest moon, rising early, shot its ray through the
crevice, and forced a silvery track amid the shadows
of the floor.
The man’s head drooped on his breast; his strong
hands rested listlessly on his knees: his attitude
was that of utter despondency and prostration.
But in the expression of his face there were the signs
of some dangerous and restless thought which belied
not the gloom but the stillness of the posture.
His brow, which was habitually open and frank, in
its defying aggressive boldness, was now contracted
into deep furrows, and lowered darkly over his downcast,
half-closed eyes. His lips were so tightly compressed
that the face lost its roundness, and the massive
bone of the jaw stood out hard and salient. Now
and then, indeed, the lips opened, giving vent to a
deep, impatient sigh, but they reclosed as quickly
as they had parted. It was one of those crises
in life which find all the elements that make up a
man’s former self in lawless anarchy; in which
the Evil One seems to enter and direct the storm;
in which a rude untutored mind, never before harbouring
a thought of crime, sees the crime start up from an
abyss, feels it to be an enemy, yet yields to it as
a fate. So that when, at the last, some wretch,
sentenced to the gibbet, shudderingly looks back to
the moment “that trembled between two worlds,”—the
world of the man guiltless, the world of the man guilty,—he
says to the holy, highly educated, rational, passionless
priest who confesses him and calls him “brother,”
“The devil put it into my head.”
At that moment the door opened; at its threshold there
stood the man’s mother—whom he had
never allowed to influence his conduct, though he
loved her well in his rough way—and the
hated fellow-man whom he longed to see dead at his
feet. The door reclosed: the mother was
gone, without a word, for her tears choked her; the
fellow-man was alone with him. Tom Bowles looked
up, recognized his visitor, cleared his brow, and
rubbed his mighty hands.
