Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 581
The chemist, an elderly man with a fatherly face, smiled at her, and said:
“But what is it for, miss?”
Bessie described her symptoms, and then the smiling face was grave.
“Are you a married woman, ma’am?” asked the chemist.
Bessie caught her breath, stared at the man for a moment with eyes full of fear, and then turned and fled out of the shop.
All that day she felt dizzy and deaf. The earth seemed to be slipping from under her. Memories of what she had heard from older women came springing to the surface of her mind, and she asked herself why she had not thought of this before. For a long time she struggled to persuade herself that the chemist was wrong, but conviction forced itself upon her at last.
Then she asked herself what she was to do, and remembering what she had learned as a child at home of her mother’s miserable life before her marriage, she found only one answer to that question. She must ask Mr. Stowell to marry her. The thought of parting from Alick was heart-breaking. But the most terrible thing was that she found herself hoping that Stowell would refuse to release her.
It had been a wretched day, dark and cheerless, with driving mist and drizzling rain. Towards nightfall the old maids lighted a fire for her in the sitting-room, which was full of quaint nicknacks and old glass and china. The tide, which was at the bottom of the ebb, was sobbing against the unseen breakwater, and the gulls on the cobbles of the shore were calling continually.
Bessie was crouching over the fire with her chin in her hand when she heard the sneck of the garden gate, a quick step on the gravel, a light knock at the front door, a familiar voice in the lobby, and then old Miss Ethel saying behind her:
“A gentleman to see you, Bessie.”
Her heart did not leap up as before, and she did not rise with her former alacrity, but Alick Gell came into the room like a rush of wind.
“What’s this unwell?” he cried.
“It’s nothing! I shall be better in the morning,” she said.
“Of course you will.”
And then, after a kiss, Gell sat on a low stool at Bessie’s feet, stretched his long legs towards the fire, and began to pour out his story.
He had seen Stowell and that matter had turned out just as she had expected. Splendid fellow! Best chap in the world, bar none t “But what do you think, Bess? The most extraordinary coincidence! Dear old Vic, he has been busy falling in love, too! Fact! Fenella Stanley, daughter of the Governor! Magnificent girl, and Vic is madly in love with her! So there’s to be no heart-breaking on either side, and that’s the best of it. Makes one think there must be something in Providence, doesn’t it?”
He was laughing so loud that the china in the room rang, but Bessie was turning cold with terror.
“And... what about your father?” she faltered.
“My father?”
“Well … to tell you the truth there was a bit of a breeze there,” he said, and then followed the story of the scene at the Speaker’s.
“But no matter! I’m not without money, so we can be married at once, and the sooner the better.”
“But Alick,” she said (he was stroking her hand and she was trying to draw it away), “do you think it’s best?”
“Best? Why, of course I think it’s best. Don’t you?”
She did not reply.
“Don’t you?” he said again, and then, getting no answer, he became aware that she, who had been so eager for their marriage before he went to Ballamoar, was now holding back.
“Bessie,” he said, “has anything happened while I’ve been away?”
“No! Oh no!”
“You’re... you’re not thinking of the loss of the income, are you?”
“No, no; ‘deed, no!”
“I knew you wouldn’t. When my father taunted me with that, saying you would give me up as soon as you knew my allowance was gone, I said, ‘Not Bessie! I’ll trust her for that, Sir.’”
Bessie began to cry. Alick was bewildered.
“What is it, then? Tell me! Are you... are you thinking of Stowell?”
At that name she was seized by the mad impulse which comes to people on dizzy heights when they wish to throw themselves over she wanted to blurt out the truth, to confess everything. But before she could speak Alick was saying, “I shouldn’t blame you if you were. I’m not his equal I know that, Bessie. But even if he were free I shouldn’t give you up to him now. No, by God, not to him or to anyone.”
His voice was breaking. She looked at him. There were tears in his eyes. She could bear up no longer. With the cry of a drowning soul she flung her arms about him and sobbed on his breast.
An hour later, having comforted and quietened her, Gell was going off with swinging strides through the mist to catch the last train back to Douglas.
“She was thinking of me that was it,” he was telling himself.
“Thought I would come to regret the sacrifice and wanted to save me from being cut off by my family. So unselfish! Never thinking of herself, bless her!”
And Bessie, in her bedroom was saying to herself, “He’s that fond of me that he’ll forgive me, whatever happens.”
She lay a long time awake, with her arms under her head, looking up at the ceiling.
“Yes, Alick will forgive me, whatever happens,” she thought.
And then she blew out her candle, buried her head in her pillow, and fell asleep.
II
When Gell reached the railway-station he found the carriages waiting at the platform, half-full of impatient passengers. A trial, which was going on in the Castle, was nearing its close, and the station-master had received orders that the last train to town was to be kept back for the Judges and advocates.
“The Peel fisherman,” thought Gell. And, remembering that this was the case in which Stowell was to represent the Attorney-General, he walked over to the Court-house, whose lantern-light was showing like a hazy white cloud above the Castle walls.
The little place was thick with sea mist, hot with the acid odour of perspiration, and densely crowded but breathlessly silent. The trial was over, the prisoner had been found guilty, and the Deemster (it was Deemster Taubman, sitting with the Clerk of the Rolls as Acting Governor) was beginning to pronounce sentence:
“Prisoner at the bar, it will be my duty to communicate to the proper quarter the Jury’s recommendation to mercy, but I can hold out no hope that it will be of any avail. You have been found guilty of the wilful murder of your wife, therefore I bid you prepare …”
And then followed those dread words in that dead stillness, which bring thoughts of the day of doom.
Gell caught one glimpse of the prisoner, as he stood in the dock, in his fisherman’s guernsey, looking steadfastly into the face of his Judge, and another glimpse as a way was cleared through the spectators and he walked with a strong step to the door leading to the cells.
Then the court-house cleared to a low rumble that was like the muffled murmuring that is heard after a funeral.
Gell asked for Stowell, and was told that his friend had gone clown to the Deemster’s room with one of the advocates for the defence to draw up the terms of the recommendation. Therefore he returned to the station with a group of his fellow advocates, and on the way back he heard the story of the trial little knowing how close it was to come to him.
The prisoner (his name was Morrison) had married the murdered woman in the winter. She had been a comely girl who had always borne a good character. On their wedding morning they had received many presents, one of them being a fishing-boat. This had been the gift of a distant relation of the bride’s, a middle-aged man who had since married a rich widow.
At Easter, Morrison had gone off with the fleet to the mackerel fishing at Kinsale, and while there he had received an anonymous letter. It told him that his young wife had given birth, less than six months after their marriage, to a still-born child.
Morrison had said nothing about the letter, but he had made inquiries about the man who had given him the boat, and been told that he had borne a bad reputation.
At the end of the mackerel season Morrison had returned to the island with the rest of the fleet, and for everybody else there had been the usual joyful homecoming.
It had been late at night on the first of June, when the stars were out and the moon was in its first quarter. As soon as the boats had been sighted outside the Castle Rock the sound signal had gone up from the Rocket House, and within five minutes the fishermen’s wives had come flying down to the quay, with their little shawls thrown over their heads and pinned under their chins.
Then, as the boats had come gliding into harbour, there had been the shrill questions of the women ashore and the deep-toned answers of the man afloat:
“Are you there, Bill?”
“Is it yourself, Nancy?”
Some of the younger women, who had had babies born while their husbands had been away, had brought them down with them, and one young wife, holding up her little one for her man to see, by the light of the moon and the harbour-master’s lantern, had cried:
“Here he is, boy! What do you think of him?”
Almost before the boats could be brought to their moorings the fishermen had leapt ashore in their long boots and gone off home with their wives, laughing and talking.
Morrison had not gone. His wife had not been down to meet him. Somebody had shouted from the quay that she was still keeping her bed and was waiting at home for him. But he had been in no hurry to go to her. When everything was quiet he had shouldered his boat to the top of the harbour, unstepped her mast, and run her ashore on the dry bank above the bridge.
Then going back to the quay, which was now deserted, he had broken the padlock of an open yard for ship’s stores, taken possession of a barrel of pitch, rolled it down to the bank by the bridge, fixed it under his boat, pulled out its plug, applied a match to it, and then waited until both barrel and boat were afire and burning fiercely.
After that he had walked home through the little sleeping town to his house in the middle of a cobweb of streets at the back of the beach. Opening the door (it had been left on the latch for him) he had bolted it on the inside, and then going to the bedroom and finding his young wife in bed, with a frightened look under a timid smile, he had charged her with her unchastity, compelled her to confess to it, and then strangled her to death with his big hands the marks of his broad thumbs, black with tar, being on her throat and bosom.
In the middle of the night the fishermen who lived in the streets nearest to the harbour, awakened by a red glow in their bedrooms, had said to their wives:
“What for are they burning the gorse on Peel hill at this time of the year?”
But others, who were neighbours of Morrison’s, having heard cries from his house in the night, had gathered in front of his door in the morning, and, getting no answer to their knocking, had burst it open and found the woman lying dead on the bed and the man huddled up on the floor at the foot of it. And when they had pushed him and roused him he had lifted Lis haggard face and said, “I’ve killed my sweetheart.”
Such was the fishermen’s story, and when the defence had concluded their case, asking for an acquittal on the ground of unbearable moral provocation, and saying that never could there have been better grounds for the application of the unwritten law, the Jury were obviously impressed, and somebody at the back of the court was saying, “If they hang him for that they’ll hang a man for anything.”
Against this sympathy for the accused, Stowell had risen to make his reply for the Crown.
He did not deny the dead woman’s transgression. It was true that she must have known when she married the prisoner that she was about to become the mother of a child by another man. But if that moral fact could be urged against the wife, was there nothing of the same kind that could be advanced in her favour?
She had been cruelly betrayed and abandoned. Looking to the future she had seen the contempt of her little world before her. What had happened? In the dark hour of her desertion the prisoner had come with the offer of his love and protection. It was in evidence that for a time she had held back and that he had pressed himself upon her. None could know the secret of the dead woman’s soul, but was it unreasonable to think that standing between the two fires of public scorn and the prisoner’s affection she had said to herself, as poor misguided women in like cases did every day: “He loves me so much that he will forgive me whatever happens.”
But had he forgiven her? No, he had killed her, wilfully, cruelly, brutally, not in the heat of blood, but after long deliberation he, the big powerful brute and she the weak, helpless, half-naked woman the woman who had been faithful to him since the day he married her, the woman he had sworn to love and cherish until death parted them.
No, the plea of moral justification was rotten to the heart’s core, and had nothing to say for itself in a Court of Law. The defence had urged that it was founded on the laws of nature that marriage implied chastity on the woman’s part, and this woman had come to her husband unchaste. On the contrary, it was founded on the barbarous law of man the infamous theory that a wife was the property of her husband and he was at liberty to do as he liked with her.
A wife was not the property of her husband. He was not at liberty to do as he liked with her. There was no such thing as the unwritten law. What was not written was not law. And if, as the result of the verdict in that court, it should go forth that any man had a right to kill his wife in any circumstances to be judge and jury and accuser and executioner over her the reign of law and order in this island would be at an end, no woman’s life would be secure, the daughter of no member of that jury would any longer be safe, and human society would dissolve into a welter of civilised savagery the worst savagery of all.
The effect of Stowell’s reply had been overwhelming. The jury had either been frightened or convinced, and even the prisoner himself, during the more intimate passages, had held down his head as if he felt himself to be the vilest scoundrel on earth.
Among the advocates (they had reached the station by this time, got into their carriages, and lit up their pipes) opinion was more divided. The younger men were enthusiastic, but some of the older ones thought the closing speech for the Crown had been false in logic and bad in law.
One of the latter, with a special cock of the hat, (it was old Hudgeon, the young men called him” Fanny” now), sat with his shaven chin on the top of his stick and said:
“Well, it’s a big gospel the young man has got to live up to, with all his tall talk about women. But we’ll see! We’ll see!”
Gell, who was wildly excited by his friend’s success, was walking to and fro on the platform waiting for Stowell’s arrival. When he came (he was the last to come) he had a graver look on his face than Gell had ever seen there before, except once, and he seemed to be painfully preoccupied.
“Ah, is it you?” he had said, when Gell laid hold of him he had started as if he had seen a ghost.
They got into the train together and had a carriage to themselves.
Gell began with his congratulations, but Stowell brushed them aside, and said:
“What happened with your father?”
Gell told his story as he had told it at Derby Haven that the Speaker had cut up badly and turned him out of the house.
“But what do I care? Not a ha’porth! Best thing that ever happened to me, perhaps.”
“And Bessie?”
“Oh, Bessie? Well, that’s all right now. A bit troubled at first about my being cut off by the family and losing my income. Just like a woman! So unselfish!”
There was silence for some time after that save for the rumble of the carriage wheels. Then Gell said he was sorry he had told Bessie about the loss of the income. She would always be thinking he would regret the sacrifice he had made for her. If he could only find some way of showing her it didn’t matter, because he could always get plenty of money ….
“And why can’t you?” said Stowell.
“How?”
“It’s two pounds a week you draw on me for Miss Brown, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll make it ten on condition that you don’t pay me back a penny until I ask for it.”
“What a good chap....” But Gell could get no farther his eyes were full and his throat was hurting him.
On arriving at Douglas he saw Stowell across the platform to the northern train, and just as it was about to start, he said:
“By the way, old man, you don’t mind my saying something?”
“Not a bit! What is it?”
“You’ve hanged that poor devil of a Peel fisherman, and I suppose he deserved it. But I caught a glimpse of him as he was going down to the cells, and I thought he looked a fine fellow.”
“He is a fine fellow.”
“Do you say that? He made a big mistake in killing the wife, though, didn’t he? If I had been in his place do you know what I should have done?”
“What?”
“Killed the other man.”
Stowell drew back in his seat and at the next moment the train started.
As it ran into the country a black thought, a vague shadow of something, was swirling like a bat in the darkness of Stowell’s brain.
That was not the first time it had come to him. It had come to him in Court, while he was speaking, startling him, stifling him, almost compelling him to sit down.
“But Bessie’s case was different,” he thought.” She was not deserted. She sent Alick to me herself. Therefore it’s impossible, quite impossible.”
Nevertheless, he slept badly that night, and as often as he awoke he had the sense of a red glow in his bedroom and of being blinded by the fierce glare from a burning boat.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE GREAT WINTER
“COME in, my boy. Sit down. Take a cigarette. I have important news for you.”
The Governor had returned from London and was calling Stowell into his smoking-room.
“First, about that recommendation to mercy. It has gone through. The death sentence has been commuted to ten years’ imprisonment.”
