Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/95

 The young man was dying of tuberculosis, and his mother, having no other hope than that he might be released to die at home, had made her appeal to Brennan, and he had seen to the filing of an application in due form, and now he asked me if I would not call the Governor's attention to it. I got out the great blue envelope containing the thin papers in the case—they were as few as the young man's friends—and took them over to the Governor, but no sooner had I laid them on his desk and made the first hesitating and tentative approach to the subject, than I divined the moment to be wholly inauspicious. The Governor did not even look at the papers, he did not even touch the big blue linen envelope, but shook his head and said:

"No, no, I will not pardon any more. The people are opposed to it; they do not believe in mercy; they love revenge; they want the prisoners punished to the bitterest extremity."

I did not then know how right he was in his cynical generalization, though I did know that his decision was so far from his own heart that it was no decision at all, but merely the natural human reaction against all the venom that had been voided upon him, and I went away then, and told Brennan that we must wait until the Governor was in another mood.

Three or four days afterward I met the Governor one morning as he was passing through the rotunda of the State House, his head bent in habitual abstraction, and seeing me in what seemed always some subconscious way he stopped and said:

"Oh, by the way: that pardon case you spoke of