第16章

A Man stood in the speckless courtyard before the Governor's house at Dartmoor gaol.He wore the ugly livery of shame which marks the convict.His head was clipped short, and there was two days'

growth of beard upon his haggard face.Standing with his hands behind him, he waited for the moment when he would be ordered to his work.

John Lexman - A.O.43 - looked up at the blue sky as he had looked so many times from the exercise yard, and wondered what the day would bring forth.A day to him was the beginning and the end of an eternity.He dare not let his mind dwell upon the long aching years ahead.He dare not think of the woman he left, or let his mind dwell upon the agony which she was enduring.He had disappeared from the world, the world he loved, and the world that knew him, and all that there was in life; all that was worth while had been crushed and obliterated into the granite of the Princetown quarries, and its wide horizon shrunken by the gaunt moorland with its menacing tors.

New interests made up his existence.The quality of the food was one.The character of the book he would receive from the prison library another.The future meant Sunday chapel; the present whatever task they found him.For the day he was to paint some doors and windows of an outlying cottage.A cottage occupied by a warder who, for some reason, on the day previous, had spoken to him with a certain kindness and a certain respect which was unusual.

"Face the wall," growled a voice, and mechanically he turned, his hands still behind him, and stood staring at the grey wall of the prison storehouse.

He heard the shuffling feet of the quarry gang, his ears caught the clink of the chains which bound them together.They were desperate men, peculiarly interesting to him, and he had watched their faces furtively in the early period of his imprisonment.

He had been sent to Dartmoor after spending three months in Wormwood Scrubbs.Old hands had told him variously that he was fortunate or unlucky.It was usual to have twelve months at the Scrubbs before testing the life of a convict establishment.He believed there was some talk of sending him to Parkhurst, and here he traced the influence which T.X.would exercise, for Parkhurst was a prisoner's paradise.

He heard his warder's voice behind him.

"Right turn, 43, quick march."

He walked ahead of the armed guard, through the great and gloomy gates of the prison, turned sharply to the right, and walked up the village street toward the moors, beyond the village of Princetown, and on the Tavistock Road where were two or three cottages which had been lately taken by the prison staff; and it was to the decoration of one of these that A.O.43 had been sent.

The house was as yet without a tenant.

A paper-hanger under the charge of another warder was waiting for the arrival of the painter.The two warders exchanged greetings, and the first went off leaving the other in charge of both men.

For an hour they worked in silence under the eyes of the guard.

Presently the warder went outside, and John Lexman had an opportunity of examining his fellow sufferer.

He was a man of twenty-four or twenty-five, lithe and alert.By no means bad looking, he lacked that indefinable suggestion of animalism which distinguished the majority of the inhabitants at Dartmoor.

They waited until they heard the warder's step clear the passage, and until his iron-shod boots were tramping over the cobbled path which led from the door, through the tiny garden to the road, before the second man spoke.

"What are you in for?" he asked, in a low voice.

"Murder," said John Lexman, laconically.

He had answered the question before, and had noticed with a little amusement the look of respect which came into the eyes of the questioner.

"What have you got!"

"Fifteen years," said the other.

"That means 11 years and 9 months," said the first man."You've never been here before, I suppose?""Hardly," said Lexman, drily.

"I was here when I was a kid," confessed the paper-hanger."I am going out next week."John Lexman looked at him enviously.Had the man told him that he had inherited a great fortune and a greater title his envy would not have been so genuine.

Going out!

The drive in the brake to the station, the ride to London in creased, but comfortable clothing, free as the air, at liberty to go to bed and rise when he liked, to choose his own dinner, to answer no call save the call of his conscience, to see - he checked himself.

"What are you in for?" he asked in self-defence.

"Conspiracy and fraud," said the other cheerfully."I was put away by a woman after three of us had got clear with 12,000pounds.Damn rough luck, wasn't it?"

John nodded.

It was curious, he thought, how sympathetic one grows with these exponents of crimes.One naturally adopts their point of view and sees life through their distorted vision.

"I bet I'm not given away with the next lot," the prisoner went on."I've got one of the biggest ideas I've ever had, and I've got a real good man to help me.""How?" asked John, in surprise.

The man jerked his head in the direction of the prison.

"Larry Green," he said briefly."He's coming out next month, too, and we are all fixed up proper.We are going to get the pile and then we're off to South America, and you won't see us for dust."Though he employed all the colloquialisms which were common, his tone was that of a man of education, and yet there was something in his address which told John as clearly as though the man had confessed as much, that he had never occupied any social position in life.

The warder's step on the stones outside reduced them to silence.

Suddenly his voice came up the stairs.

"Forty-three," he called sharply, "I want you down here."John took his paint pot and brush and went clattering down the uncarpeted stairs.