Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 572
Ashamed? Why should she be? People had said all they could say about a girl like her while she was a baby in arms, and who was there to say anything now?
And then Mr. Stowell wouldn’t care either. He was rich, therefore he had no need to be afraid of anybody. And if he were fond of a girl he would stand up for her and defy the whole island that was the sort of young man he was!
The last train could not reach Ramsey before midnight, and it might be later. It was only half -past eleven yet. There was still time. Why shouldn’t she?
“‘Find your bed,’ indeed! We’ll see! We’ll see!”
Three-quarters of an hour later she was approaching Ramsey.
The stars had gone out; the night was becoming gloomy; she was tired and her spirit of defiance was breaking down under a chilling thought. What if Mr. Stowell did not want her? It was one thing for a young man to amuse himself with a girl in the glen or in a dancing-hall, but to become responsible for her ….
“If he felt like that and found me in Ramsey what would he think?”
Afraid and ashamed she was slowing down with the thought of returning to the Ginger Hall when she heard the train whistle behind her, and looking back, saw its fiery head forging through the darkness. That sent the hot blood bounding to her heart again, and within a few minutes she was walking slowly down the main street of the town, which was all shut up and silent.
She knew where Mr. Stowell’s rooms were in Old Post Office Place and that he would have to come this way to get to them. She heard the train drawing up in the station, the passengers trooping out, parting in the square and shouting their good-nights as they went off by the streets to the north and south. One group was coming behind, on the other side of the way, laughing over something they had seen at a place of entertainment. They passed and turned down a side street and the echo of their voices died away at the back of the houses.
Then came a few moments of sickening silence. Bessie, as she walked on, could hear nothing more, and another chilling thought came to her. What if Mr. Stowell had not returned by the train and were sleeping the night in Douglas?
All her courage and defiance ebbed away, and she saw herself for the first time as she was a miserable girl, cast out of her step-father’s house, in which she had worked so hard but in which nothing belonged to her, homeless, penniless (for she had spent her half -year’s wages on her clothes) without a shelter, in the middle of the night, alone!
It was beginning to rain and Bessie was crying. All at once she heard a firm step behind her. It was he! She was sure of it! Her heart again beat high and all her nerves began to tingle. He was overtaking her. She turned her head aside and wiped her eyes. He was walking beside her. She could hear his breathing.
“Bessie!”
“Mr. Stowell!”
“Good gracious, girl, what are you doing here?” And then she told him.
III
“The brute! The beast! Did you tell him your train was late?”
“No. He ought to have known that for himself.”
“So he ought. You are quite right there, Bessie. But didn’t your mother....”
“Mother is afraid of her life of the man. She daren’t say anything.”
“Was there any other house he might have thought you would go to any neighbour’s, any relation’s?”
“I have no relations, Sir.”
“Ah!... Then he deliberately shut you out of his house in the middle of the night, knowing you had nowhere else to go to?”
“Yes!”
“The damned scoundrel!”
Bessie, who had been crying again, was looking up at him with wet but shining eyes.
“Well, what are you going to do now? Do you know anybody in town who can take you in for to-night?”
“No.”
“Then I must knock up one of the Inns for you. Here’s the old Plough what do you say to the Plough?”
“Dan Baldromma goes there Mrs. Beatty would get into trouble.”
“The Saddle then?”
“I go there myself, every market-day, with butter and eggs people would be talking.”
There was only the Mitre Hotel left, and Stowell himself shrank from that. To go to the Mitre with a girl at this time of night would be like shouting into the mouth of a megaphone. Within twenty-four hours the whole town would hear the story, with every explanation except the right one.
“But, good heavens, girl, I can’t go home and go to bed and leave you to walk about in the streets.”
“I’ll do whatever you think best, Sir,” said Bessie, crying again and stammering.
They were at the corner of Old Post Office Place by this time, and, after a moment’s hesitation, he took the girl’s hand and drew it through his arm and then turned quickly in the opposite direction, saying:
“Come, then, let us think.”
It was still raining but Stowell was scarcely aware of that. With the girl walking close by his side he was only conscious of a return of the faint dizziness he had felt in the garden at Douglas. To conquer this and to keep up his indignation about Dan Baldromma, while they walked round the square of streets, he asked what the man had said when he finally shut down the window.
“He said I was to find my bed where I had found my company,” said Bessie, stammering again and with her head down.
“Meaning that you had been in bad company?”
“Yes.”
“The foul-minded ruffian!”
His nerves were quivering, and he knew that the hot tide of his indignation was ebbing rapidly. Suddenly an idea came to him and he felt an immense relief Mrs. Quayle! She was a good, religious woman, who had seen sorrow herself, and that was the best kind to go to in a time of trouble. She would take Bessie in for to-night, and to- morrow they would all three go back together to Baldromma, and then he would tell that old blackguard what he thought of him.
“That’s it, Bessie! I wonder why in the world I didn’t think of it before?”
Bessie was answering” Yes” and” Yes,” but her beaming eyes were looking sideways up at him, and the blood was pounding through his body with a rush.
They had got back to the corner of Old Post Office Place when Stowell stopped and said:
“Wait! Mrs. Quayle’s house is rather a long way off one of the little fishermen’s cottages on the south beach, you know. I’m not quite sure that she has a second bed. And then she might be alarmed if two of us turned up at this time of night. What if I run over first and make sure?”
Again Bessie answered “Yes” and “Yes.”
“But it’s raining heavily now, and, of course, you can’t stay out in the streets any longer. Here are my rooms just here. Why shouldn’t you step in and wait? I shall have to go upstairs for an overcoat anyway.”
Bessie showed no embarrassment, and Victor felt at first that what he was doing was something a little courageous and rather noble. But as soon as they reached the door, and he began to fumble with his key to open it, he became nervous and a voice within him seemed to say, “Take care!”
“Come in,” he said bravely, but when Bessie brushed him on entering the house he trembled, and from that moment onwards he was conscious of a struggle between his blood and his brain.
As he was closing the door on the inside he saw that there was a letter in the letter-box at the back of it, but he left it there, and held out his hand to Bessie to guide her up the stairs, saying:
“It’s dark here. Give me your hand. Now come this way. Don’t be afraid. You shan’t fall. I’ll take care of you.”
There were two short flights and then a landing, from which a door opened on either side on the right to Victor’s offices, on the left to his living-rooms. He opened the door on the left, leaving Bessie to stand on the landing until he had found matches and lit the gas.
He was long in finding them, and while rummaging in the dark room he heard the girl’s quick breathing behind him.
“Ah, here they are at last!” he cried in a tremulous voice, and then he lit up a branch under a white globe on one side of the mantelpiece.
“Now you can come in,” he said, and turning to the window he loosened the cord of the Venetian blind and it came clattering down.
Bessie stepped into the room. It was a warm and cosy chamber, with a thick Persian carpet, two easy chairs, an open book-case full of law books, a desk-table with ink-stand, writing-pad and reading-lamp (looking so orderly as to suggest that no work was done there) and a large pier-glass with a small bust of a pretty Neapolitan girl and a little silver-cased clock ha front of it. The clock was striking one.
“One o’clock! It was stupid to stay out in the streets so long, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Your hat is dripping. Hadn’t you better take it off for the few minutes you’ll have to stay?”
“Should I?”
“Do; and I’ll light the gas-fire a bachelor has to have gas-fires, you know.”
While he was down on his knees lighting the fire, and regulating its burning from blue to red, Bessie, with trembling fingers, was drawing the pins out of her hat the wonderful new hat of a few hours ago, now wet and bedraggled. In doing so she pulled down her hair and made a faint cry, “Oh!”
“Don’t mind that at this time of night,” said Victor. But at sight of the girl’s face, now framed in its shower of waving black hair, his nervousness increased. He had always thought her a good-looking girl, but he had never known before that she was beautiful.
“My coat is wet, too. I must change it,” he said, getting up and going towards his bedroom door.” It would be foolish to put an overcoat over a wet jacket, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“But your blouse seems to be soaking. Why shouldn’t you take it off and dry it at the fire while I’m away at Mrs. Quayle’s?”
“Should I?”
“Why not?”
While he was in the inner room, opening and closing his wardrobe, and changing his wet coat for a dry one, he kept on talking. Mrs. Quayle was a good creature who had lost her husband in that January gale a few years ago. She would take Bessie in he was sure she would. But this was only to drown the clamour of two voices within himself, one of which was saying,” Must you go?” and the other” Certainly you must! Be a man and play the game, for God’s sake.”
When he returned to the sitting-room the breath was almost smitten out of his body by what he saw. Bessie had taken off her blouse, and was kneeling by the fire to dry it. She did not raise her eyes to Ms, and after a first glance he did not look at her. Opening the outer door to the landing, where the hat-rail stood, he pulled on a cap and dragged on an ulster, saying, in a nervous voice, “It’s only a hop-skip-and-a-jump to Mrs. Quayle’s. I shall be back presently.”
Suddenly there came a flash of lightning which lit up the dark bedroom, and then a clap of thunder, loud and long, which rattled the window frames.
“It would be foolish to go out in a storm like that, wouldn’t it?” he said.
“‘Deed it would,” said Bessie. She had risen with a start, but now she knelt again and held her steaming blouse before the fire.
Stowell took off his cap and ulster and dropped them on to a chair. Then he walked about the room, trying to keep his eyes from the girl, and to fill the difficult silence by talking on indifferent subjects other storms he had seen in other countries.
After a while the thunder went off in the direction of Ireland, its echo becoming fainter and fainter in the sonority of the sea.
“It’s gone now I can go,” he said.
But hardly had he taken up his cap again when the rain, which had ceased for a moment, came in a sudden torrent.
“Only a thunder shower it will soon be over,” he said.
But the rain went on and on. Good Lord, were the very forces of nature conspiring to keep him there all night?
It was half-past one by the clock on the mantelpiece, and the rain was still pelting on the pavement of the street outside with a sound like that of an army in retreat. Stowell was feeling alternately hot and cold, and the voice within him was saying,” Must you go? You would be drenched through before you got back from Mrs. Quayle’s, and the girl would be as wet in getting there as if you had dropped her into the sea.” After a few minutes more he said, “Bessie, I’m afraid we shall have to give up the idea of going to Mrs. Quayle’s.”
“Yes?”
“But you can stay here, and I can go over to the Mitre.”
“No, no.”
“It’s nothing only two yards away.”
Johnny Kelly, the boots, slept on the ground floor he could get him up without ringing the bell. Of course he would have to tell the old man some cock-and-bull story that he had lost his key or something.
“But it’s the very thing. I wonder I didn’t think of it before.”
He half hoped and half feared she might make some further protest. But she did not, so he picked up his cap and ulster and was making for the door when he thought of the gas. Would Bessie, who had been brought up in a thatched cottage, know how to put it out?
“Well, no, no,” she stammered.
“It’s quite simple. You turn the tap, so. …”
He had to kneel by her side to show her, and he was feeling the warm glow he had felt in the glen.
“But not being used of it. …”
“Then I know the reading-lamp!”
He leapt up to light it, and having done so, he turned out the branch under the white globe, saying, with a laugh, it was lucky he had thought of the lamp, for if old Johnny had seen the light in the window the story of the key would have sounded thin, wouldn’t it?
Then she laughed too, and they laughed together, but their laughter broke into a sharp and breathless silence.
He carried the lamp into the bedroom, put it on the table by the bedside and then pulled down the white window-blind, breaking the cord by the tug of his trembling fingers. He was feeling as if another storm, a storm of emotions, were now thundering within him.” Must you go?”“You must! You shall! Good Lord, could a man of any conscience …. Never! Never!”
When he returned to the sitting-room Bessie had risen to her feet.
She was standing at the opposite side of the mantelpiece and the intoxicating red light of the fire was over her. Stowell thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. But he could not trust himself to look twice.
“You’ll be all right here, Bessie,” he said, in a loud voice, snatching up his coat and cap and making for the door.” You can let yourself out of the house as early as you like in the morning; and if you decide to go back to that damned old devil at Baldromma you can tell him from me where you passed the night, and I’ll stand up for you why shouldn’t I?”
Then he heard a breathless cry behind him, and then the words, “Must you go?”
He stopped and turned. Was it Bessie who had spoken? She had taken a step towards him, was breathing irregularly and looking at him with gleaming eyes.
He felt as if the floor were rocking under his feet, as if the walls were reeling round him, as if he were seeing the face of woman for the first time.
At the next moment they were clasped in each other’s arms.
CHAPTER TEN
THE CALL OF THE BALLAMOARS
“WHAT a mistake! What a hideous blunder!”
Stowell, who had slept little, was awakening as from a bad dream. A dull lead-coloured light was filtering through the white window-blind.
He could not help seeing it Bessie was not as pretty as he had thought. There was something common about her beauty when she was asleep which had been effaced by her eyes while she was awake.
Ashamed to look any longer he stepped into the sitting-room. A close odour hung in the air. The gas fire was still burning, and Bessie’s blouse was lying, where she had flung it, on the floor. With a sense of moral and physical suffocation, he went downstairs and out into the streets.
The morning was fine and the dawn was breaking, but the town was still asleep. So great was the upheaval within himself that in some vague way he expected everything to look changed. But no, everything was the same the shops, the signs, the lamps, which had not yet been put out. There was no sound except that of his own footsteps on the pavement, and to deaden this he walked in the middle of the streets.
He wanted to be alone, to leave the town behind him. Turning northward he crossed the harbour bridge and made for the red pier which stood out into the bay with a light-house at the end of it.
The tide hummed far off on the shore. It was the bottom of the ebb. Trading schooners were lying half on their sides in the mud. Seagulls were calling over it. Sand, slime, sea-wrack and the broken refuse of the town lay uncovered at the harbour’s mouth, and the last draught of the ebbing water was playing about them with a guttural sound.
When he came to the light-house he saw that some fragments of stone and glass were lying about, but his mind was too confused to ask itself what had happened. He sat down on the light-house steps, looked down, into the harbour-basin and tried to think.
Good Lord, what a fool he had been! To ask the girl into his rooms, being who and what she was, alone, in the middle of the night, just after he had formed the resolution to go home and put himself out of the reach of temptation …. what a fool!
He thought of the stories people had told of him and how he had justified the very ugliest and worst of them …. what a fool I He remembered what he had said to Janet, that no girl on the island or in the world had ever come to any harm through him, or ever should. That was only a little while ago and now …. what a fool!
He recalled the white heat of his indignation against Dan Baldromma for what he had done to his step-daughter. That was only last night, and now he himself …. what a fool! What a fool!
Then the sense of his folly gave way to a sense of shame. Down to yesterday he had lived a decent life. Reckless, heedless, careless, stupid perhaps, but decent anyway. And now …. what shame!
