Tinman

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Gallon Tom. Tinman

PART I

CHAPTER I. What I Found in the Wood

CHAPTER II. And What I Lost

CHAPTER III. Her Wedding Day

CHAPTER IV. The Killing of the Lie

CHAPTER V. Alas! for Poor Prince Charlie!

CHAPTER VI. I Leave the World

PART II

CHAPTER I. Mine Enemy

CHAPTER II. Ghosts

CHAPTER III. I Enter upon Servitude

CHAPTER IV. The Coming of the Wolves

CHAPTER V. I Touch Disaster

CHAPTER VI. Love with the Veiled Face

CHAPTER VII. News of the Prisoner

CHAPTER VIII. I Assist the Enemy

CHAPTER IX. I Know the Way at Last

CHAPTER X. Too Late!

CHAPTER XI. I Tell the Truth

CHAPTER XII. The Haunted Man

CHAPTER XIII. I Face the World Again

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In all that I shall set down here, in telling the strange story of my poor life, I shall write nothing but the truth. It has been written in many odd times and in many odd places: in a prison cell, on paper stamped with the prison mark; on odd scraps of paper in a lonely garret under the stars, with a candle-end for light – and I, poor and old and shivering – scrawling hastily because the time was so short. I have been at once the meanest and the greatest of all men; the meanest – because all men shuddered at the mere mention of my name, and at the thought of what I had done; the greatest – because one woman loved me, and taught me that beyond that nothing else mattered. I have lived in God's sunlight, and in the sunlight of her eyes; I have gone down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and have not been afraid; I have been caged like a wild beast, until I forgot the world, just as the world forgot me. In a mere matter of the counting of years I am but little past forty years of age; yet I am an old man, and I have lived two lives – just as, when my time comes, I shall have died two deaths. I have touched the warm lips of Love; I have clasped the gaunt hands of Misery. I have warmed both hands at the fire of Life; but now the fire has gone out, and only the cold grey ashes remain. But of all that you may read, just as I have written it, and as the memory of it has come back to me. Roll up the curtain – and see me as I was – and judge me lightly.

It is not necessary that you should hear what manner of boy I was, nor how I impressed those with whom I came in contact. I have no recollection of my parents; they died, perhaps mercifully for them, when I was quite young. I went to school in the ordinary way; I would not have you think that I was anything but an ordinary boy. A little dreamy, perhaps, and introspective; with those hopes and high ideals that come to youth generally a little stronger in my case than in that of most boys. I had a very decent fortune, left in the hands of a highly respectable guardian; for the rest, apart from the mere matter of education, I discovered pretty early that I was to be left to my own devices, it being considered sufficient that I should grow up as a gentleman, and should please myself. I think now that if I had had some guiding will stronger than my own, I might never have done what I did, and I might now be a highly respectable citizen, respected by those who knew me, and with a life of easy contentment spreading itself fairly about my feet. Instead of which —

.....

She did not see me until she was quite close, and then she stopped, and looked at me, quite unafraid. She was quite young – only eighteen, as I knew afterwards – and she looked little more than a child. As I stumbled to my feet, she looked shyly at me, and smiled; and it seemed then as though I knew her, and as though she knew me. Afterwards, when we came at another time to talk about it, she told me that it had seemed as though she had come there to meet me out of some other life that was left behind with that moment; and indeed, I cannot better express my own feelings than in that way. Perhaps Youth called to Youth; or perhaps all that was to be was written down in some grim Book of Fate, of which we did not hold the key.

She shyly looked at my work, and asked questions about it; begged that I would go on with it – and perhaps wondered why I could not, with her distracting draperies fluttering against me almost, as she stood. Like a child, and with a child's confidence in me, she offered to show me a spot in the woods more beautiful than that I had chosen; I left my easel, and we walked side by side among the trees, talking. I do not know now of what we talked, but we seemed to speak of everything vital and important in heaven and earth. And then, surprisingly, she told me her name.

.....