Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 582
“I am glad, Sir very glad.”
“Next, your speech, deputizing for the Attorney, was reported part of it in the London newspapers and made a good impression.”
“I’m very proud, Sir.”
“I dined with the Home Secretary the following night, and the Lord Chief Justice, who was among the guests, was warm in his approval. Acid old fellow with noisy false teeth, but quite enthusiastic about your defence of law and order. Crime was contagious like disease, and there was an epidemic of violence in the world now. If society was to be saved from anarchy then law alone could save it. Some of their English courts judges as well as juries had been criminally indulgent to crimes of passion. Our little Manx court had shown them a good example.”
“That is very encouraging, Sir.”
“Very! And now the last thing I have to tell you is that Tynwald Court this morning voted a sum for a memorial to your father, leaving the form of it to me. I’ve decided on a portrait by Mylechreest, your Manx artist, to be hung in the Court-house at Castle Rushen. Mylechreest knew the Deemster (saw him at his last Court, in fact) and thinks he can paint the portrait from memory. But if you have any photographs let him have them without delay. And now off you go! Somebody’s waiting for you in the drawing-room.”
During the next six months Stowell worked as he had never worked before. Four hours a day at his office or in the Courts, and uncounted hours at home. Janet used to say she could never look out of her bedroom window at night without seeing his light from the library on the lawn.
Nevertheless he was at Government House every day, and Fenella and he had their cheerful hours together.
Winter came on. It was such a winter as nobody in the island could remember to have seen before. First wind that lashed the sea into loud cries about the coast, blew over the Curraghs with a perpetual wailing, ran up the glen with a roar, and brought the “boys” out of their beds to hold the roofs on their houses by throwing ropes over the thatch and fastening them down with stones.
Then rain that deluged the low-lying lands, so that women had to go to market in boats; and then mist that hid the island for a week and brought more ships ashore than anybody had seen since the days of the ten black brothers of Jurby who (long suspected of wrecking) were caught stuffing the box tombs in the churchyard with rolls of Irish cloth.
But neither wind, nor rain, nor mist, kept Stowell from Fenella.
Clad in boots up to his thighs, with an oilskin coat tightly belted about the waist and a sou’wester strapped down from crown to chin, he would cross the mountains on his young chestnut mare, with the island roaring about him like a living thing, and arrive at Fenella’s door with his horse’s flanks steaming and his own face ablaze.
After the wind and the rain came a long frost, which laid its unseen hand on the rivers and waterfalls, making a deep hush that was like a great peace after a great war. In the middle of the island (the valley of Baldwin) there was a tarn into which the mountains drained, and as soon as this was frozen over Stowell and Fenella skated on it.
What a delight! The ice humming under their feet like a muffled drum; the air ringing to their voices like a cup; the sun sparkling in the hoar frost on the bare boughs of the trees; the blue sky sailing over the hilltops, capped with white clouds that looked like soft lamb’s wool.
God, how good it was to be alive!
Then came a great snow that brought a still deeper silence, broken at Ballamoar only by the skid of the steel runners of the stiff carts, whose wheels had been removed, and the smothered calling of the cattle which had been shut up in the houses.
But what rapture! Every morning the farmers looked out of their windows, thick with ice, to see if the snow had gone, but as Stowell drew his blind and the snow light of the winter’s sun came pouring in upon him, he thought only of another joyous day with Fenella.
Then up to Injebreck in white sweaters and woollen helmets to fly down the long slopes on ski, with all the world around them robed and veiled like a bride.
There was a broad ridge on the top, a great divide, separating the north of the island from the south, and as they skimmed across it from sight of eastern to sight of western sea, it was just as if they were sailing through the sky with the white round hills for clouds and the earth lying somewhere far below.
They were doing this one day when Stowell came upon a place where the snow was honeycombed with holes.
“Helloa! There’s something here!” he cried.
Digging into the snow he found a buried sheep, still alive but unable to stand. So, taking it by its front and back legs he swung it over his head on to his shoulders and carried it to a shepherd’s hut a mile away, where a turf fire was burning, and dogs, with snow on their snouts, were barking about a pen of bleating sheep that had been similarly recovered.
His delight at this rescue was so boisterous that he went back and back for hours and brought in other and other sheep.
Fenella, who followed him with his ski staffs, was in raptures. This was a new side of Victor Stowell, and she had a woman’s joy in it. He was not only clever, he was strong. He could not only make speeches (as nobody else in the world could), he could ride and skate and ski, and (if he liked) he could lift a woman in his arms and throw her over his shoulder. Something would come of this some day she was sure it would.
They were at the top of the pass, stamping the snow off their ski, and shaking it out of their gloves, before going down to the Governor’s carriage which (also on runners) was waiting for them at the inn at the bottom of the hill. The sun was setting and the red light of it was flushing Fenella’s face. She looked sideways at Stowell with a mischievous light in her eyes a*d said, “Now I know what you are, Sir?”
“Yes?”
“You are not a lawyer, really.”
“No?”
“You’re an old Viking, born a thousand years after your time.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yes,” she said, making ready for flight, “one of those sea robbers you told me of, who came to take possession of the island and capture its women.”
“Really?”
“I dare say you’re sorry you’re not back with your ridiculous old ancestors, catching a woman for your wife.”
“Not a bit! I’ve caught one already.”
“Eh? What? If you mean... Don’t be too sure, Sir! You’ve not caught me yet!”
“Haven’t I? Look out then I’m going to catch you now.”
“Catch me!” she cried, and away she flew down the slopes, laughing, screaming, rocking, reeling, and leaping over the drifts, until at length she tumbled into a deep one, with head down and ski in air, and came up half blind, with Stowell’s arms about her and his lips kissing the snow off her chin and nose.
What a winter! Could there be any sorrow or sin or crime in the world at all? And what did it want its prisons and courts for?
But the thaw came at length, and then the noises of the garrulous old island began again with the rattle of the cart wheels, the rumble of the rivers running to the sea, and the mooing and bleating of the liberated cattle and sheep, coming out of their Ark and going back to the discoloured grass of the fields.
Stowell and Fenella felt as if they were descending to a world of reality from a world of dreams.
“Good-night!”
They were in the porch at Government House after the last of their winter expeditions. He was crushing her in his arms again, to the ruin of her beautiful hair, and whispering of the time that was coming when there would be no need for such partings, “Three months yet, Sir!”
“Heavens, what an age!”
And then home to Ballamoar, with his young chestnut under him sniffing the night air, and over his head a paradise of stars.
II.
“Come immediately. Important news for you.”
It was a telegram from the Governor, who had been in London again. Stowell went up to Douglas by the first train.
“It’s about the Deemstership.”
“Ah!”
“Old Taubman, as you know, has been complaining of overwork ever since your father died. The winter has crippled him and he is down with rheumatism. Fortnightly courts being postponed, cases in arrears it was necessary to do something. So I went up to Whitehall last week and told them a successor would have to be appointed. They asked me to recommend a name and I recommended yours.”
“Mine, Sir?”
“Yours! It was all right, too, until I had to tell them your age, and then phew! A judge and not yet thirty! I stood to my ground, said this was the age of youth, quoted the classical examples. Anyhow, there was my recommendation take it or leave it.”
“And what was the result, Sir?”
“The result was that the Lord Chief was consulted, and then our insignificance saved us. Yes, there was precedent enough for young judges in colonies and dependencies. And this being a case of a worthy son succeeding a worthy father … and so on and so forth.”
“Well?”
“Well, the end of it is that you are to go up to see the Home Secretary after the House has risen at Easter.”
Stowell’s heart was beating high, yet he hardly knew whether he was more proud than afraid. He mumbled something about the claims of his seniors at the bar.
“Oh yes, I know! All the old stick-in-the-muds! But keep your end up in London and I’ll keep mine up here.”
“You are very good, Sir. You have always been good to me.”
The Governor, who had been rattling on, in a rush of high spirits, suddenly became grave and spoke slowly.
“Not at all,” he said. “And I’m not thinking of you as … what you are going to be. I’m thinking of you as your father’s son, and expecting you to live up to your traditions. We want the spirit of the great Deemster in the island these days. Violence! Violence! Violence! I agree with the Lord Chief. It seems as if the world is getting out of hand. Justice is the only thing that can save it from anarchy utter anarchy and ruin. Let’s have no more recommendations to mercy! When people commit crime let them suffer. When they take life no matter who or what they are let them die for it.”
“And by the way” (Stowell was leaving the room),” your father’s portrait is finished. We must unveil it before you go up to London.”
Trembling all over, Stowell went into the library to tell Fenella.
“How splendid!” she said. She was glowing with excitement. “You’ve done magnificent work for women as an advocate, but only think what you will be able to do as a judge! There isn’t a poor, wronged girl in the island who won’t know that she has a friend on the Bench!”
Third Book: The Consequence
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE EVE OF MARY
BESSIE COLLISTER had passed through a very different winter.
When she read in the insular newspaper the long report of the trial of the Peel fisherman she was terrified. Men did not forgive their wives, then, in such cases? On the contrary the more they loved them the less they forgave them.
Gell came bounding into the sitting-room while she had the newspaper in her hand and before she had time to hide it away he saw what she had been reading.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” he said. “Poor devil, I was sorry for him. When a woman deceives a man like that the law ought to allow him to put her away. He did wrong, of course, but he had no legal remedy not an atom. Old Vic made out a magnificent case for the woman, but she deserved all she got, I’m afraid.”
Bessie gave a frightened cry, and then Gell said, as if to conciliate her, “I’ll tell you what, though. If the woman was guilty there was somebody else who was ten times guiltier, and that was the other man. The scoundrel! The treacherous, deceitful scoundrel, skulking away in the dark! I should like to choke the life out of him. That’s what I said to Stowell going up in the train. ‘If I had been in the husband’s place do you know what I should have done?’ I said. ‘I should have killed the other man.’”
Bessie’s terror increased ten-fold. Dread of what Gell might do sat on her like a nightmare. To marry him seemed to be impossible, yet not to marry him, now that she loved him so much, seemed to be impossible also.
A secret hope came to her. It was early days yet. Perhaps something would happen to her bye-and-bye, which, being over and done with, would leave her free to marry Alick with a clean heart and conscience.
To help it to come to pass, she stayed indoors, took no exercise, and ate as little as possible. Her health declined, and her face in the glass began to look peaky. She took a fierce joy in these signs of increasing weakness. The Miss Browns kept a few chickens in their back garden, and one morning, after the snow had begun to fall, they found Bessie in bare feet going out to feed them.
“Bessie, what are you doing?” they cried.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m used of it, you know. I was eight years old before I wore shoe or stocking.”
Meantime she was putting Gell off and off. “Time enough yet, boy,” she would say as often as he asked her.
“She’s thinking of me again,” thought Gell, and he began on a long series of fictions to account for his new-found prosperity. He was getting along wonderfully in his profession, and was better off now than he had been before he lost his allowance. But still it was “Bye-and-bye! Time enough yet, boy!”
One day Gell came with an almost irresistible story. He had bespoken a house in Athol Street. It was just what they wanted. Close to the Law Library and nearly opposite the new Court House. Two rooms on the ground floor for his offices, two on the first floor for their living apartments, and two on the top for the kitchen and for the maid.
It is the temptation that no woman can resist the desire to have a home that shall be all her own and for a few weeks Bessie fell to it. Evening after evening, she and Alick sat side by side in the sitting-room making catalogues of all they would require to set up a household. Gell took charge of the tables and chairs and side-boards. Bessie was the authority on the blankets and linen. It was such a delight to construct a home from memory! And then what laughs and thrills and shamefaced looks when, in spite of all their thinking, they remembered some intimate and essential thing which they had hitherto forgotten.
“Sakes alive, boy, you’ve forgotten the bedstead.”
“Lord, so I have. We shall want a bedstead, shan’t we?”
But even this fierce gambling with her fate broke down at last with Bessie. The certainty had fallen on her. The natural strength of her constitution had withstood all the attacks she had made upon it. Whether she married Gell, or did not marry him, there was nothing before except suffering and disgrace. How could she keep his love against the shame that was striding down on her?
Christmas had come. It was Christmas Eve. The Manx people call it Oie’l Verry (the Eve of Mary), and during the last hour before midnight they take possession of their parish churches, over the heads of their clergy, for the singing of their ancient Manx carvals (carols). The old Miss Browns were to keep Oie’l Verry at their church in Castletown. They had always done so, and this time Bessie was to go with them.
It was a clear cold winter’s night with crisp snow underfoot, and overhead a world of piercing stars.
As the two old maids in their long black boas, and Bessie in a fur-lined coat which Gell had sent as a Christmas present, crossed the foot-bridge over the harbour and walked under the blind walls of the dark castle, the great clock in the square tower was striking eleven. But it was bright enough in the market place, with the light from the church windows on the white ground, and people hurrying to church at a quick trot and stamping the snow off their boots at the door.
It was brighter still inside, for the altar and pulpit had been, decorated with ivy and holly, and, though the church was lit by gas, most of the worshippers, according to ancient custom, had brought candles also.
The church was very full, but the old Miss Browns, with Bessie behind them, walked up the aisle to the pew under the reading- desk which they had always rented. The congregation about them was a strangely mixed one, and the atmosphere was half solemn and half hilarious.
The gallery was occupied by farm lads and fisher-lads chiefly, and they were craning their necks to catch glimpses of the girls in the pews below, while the girls themselves (as often as they could do so without being observed by their elders) were glancing tip with gleaming eyes. In the body of the church there were middle-aged folks with soberer faces, and in the front seats sat old people, with slower and duller eyes and cheeks scored deep with wrinkles the mysterious hieroglyphics of life’s troubled story, sickness and death, husbands lost at half-tide and children gone before them.
An opening hymn had just been sung, the last notes of the organ were dying down, the clergyman, in his surplice, was sitting by the Bide of the altar, and the first of the carol singers had risen in his pew, candle in hand, to sing his carval.
He was a rugged old man from the mountains of Rushen, half landsman and half seaman, and Ms carol (which he sang in the Manx, while the tallow guttered down on his discoloured fingers) was a catalogue of all the bad women mentioned in the Bible, from.
Eve, the mother of mankind, who brought evil into the world, to “that graceless wench, Salome.”
After that came similar carols, sung by similar carol-singers and received by the boys in the gallery with gusts of laughter which the Clerk tried in vain to suppress. But at last there came a carval sung in chorus by twelve young girls with sweet young voices and faces that were chaste and pure and full of joy all carrying their candles as they walked slowly up the aisle from the western end of the church to the altar steps.
Their carol was an account of the Nativity, scarcely less crude than the carols that had gone before it, though the singers seemed to know nothing of that how Joseph, being a just man, had espoused a virgin, and finding she was with child before he married her, be had wished to put her away, but the angel of the Lord had appeared to him and told him not to, and how at last he had carried his wife and child away into the land of Egypt, out of reach of the wrath of Herod the King, who was trying to disgrace and destroy them.
