Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 593
“It’s Fenella,” said the Governor, looking out of the window. “I’ll ask you to say nothing to her about the subject of our conversation. And listen” (he was re-lighting his pipe and puffing at it with lips that smacked angrily; Stowell’s hand was on the door), “don’t let my girl make a damned fool of you.”
II
“Victor, I have something to tell you,” said Fenella.
“Yes?”
They were in the library. She was looking feverish; he was feeling ashamed, embarrassed and afraid.
“I have found out who was the friend of that poor girl.”
He gazed at her without speaking.
“It will be a great shock to you it was Alick Cell.”
“No, no!”
“I’m sorry, dear. I knew you would be unable to believe it. But it’s true terribly true.”
Mrs. Quayle, the evening before, had said very little. Nobody had called to see the girl while she stayed at her house, and nobody had come to take her away. She, herself, had seen her off by the train, and all the girl had told her was that she was going to a school at Derby Haven.
“But that was enough for me,” said Fenella. “This morning I went down to Derby Haven and found there was only one school there. It is kept by two maiden ladies named Brown. Simple old things, very timid and old-fashioned. They were thrown into terrible commotion by my call, and having read the reports in the newspapers they were at first afraid to say anything. But after I had promised that they should not be mixed up in the matter in any way, I got them to speak. Mr. Alick Gell had brought the girl to their house. He had paid for her, and they had always looked upon him as her intended husband. So it’s a certainty, you see a shocking certainty.”
Stowell was breathless.
“But my dear Fenella,” he said, “this is a mistake. You are drawing a false inference....”
But Fenella only shook her head.
“Yes. I knew your loyalty to your friend would compel you to say so. But what do you think? I have since found that the fact is common knowledge.”
Returning in the train she had occupied a compartment with two men the strangest looking creatures she had ever seen in a first-class carriage. One of them turned out to be the girl’s step-father and the other a member of the House of Keys.
“Caesar Qualtrough?”
“Caesar? Yes, that was the name. They talked about the forthcoming trial and didn’t seem to mind my hearing them perhaps wished me to. The step-father (he spoke as if the whole case had been got up to disgrace him) was complaining that he had not been called by either side. But no matter, he would force himself upon the Court and expose the real criminal the Speaker’s son. It was all a trick. But it should not succeed. He would put the saddle on the right horse, he would. And then they talked about you.”
“What... what about me?”
“That the report of your being too ill to sit was a lie. You were not ill at all and never had been the step -father knew better. You were merely shirking your duty to save your friend in some way. But that trick shouldn’t succeed either, or the people should know what Judges in the Isle of Man were. So you see you must sit on this case, dear if you are fit for it. You can’t afford to have it said that you have sacrificed your duty as a Judge to your personal interests. At your first Court, too.”
Stowell was in torture. In spite of the Governor’s warning, an almost overpowering impulse came to him to confess, to make a clean breast of everything, there and then, and once for all.
“Fenella,” he began (his breath was coming and going in gusts), “who knows if the guilty man is Gell? It may be somebody else.”
“Who else can it be?”
He tried to say “It is I,” but hesitated he could not shatter in a word the whole world he lived in. At the next moment she was praising his fidelity, which would not allow him to think ill of his life-long friend.
“But he has no such delicacy,” she said. “Knowing what he knows he is still going to defend the girl, and that’s equal to defending himself, isn’t it? How shocking!”
Stowell’s shame at his moral cowardice reached the point of abasement, and he dropped his head. Then, carried away by her own pleading, Fenella put her arms about his neck, tenderly and caressingly, and told him she knew well what a hard thing she was asking him to do to sit in judgment on his friend also, for that was what it would come to. But she would love him for ever if he would do it. It would be like the crown of all her hopes, the fulfilment of all she had worked for, if in some way (he would know best how) a poor girl who had sinned and suffered should have mercy shown to her, and not be left alone in her shame, but have the partner of her sin (no matter who he was or how near he came) standing side by side with her.
There was a moment of silence. Stowell was like a man groping in the dark of a black midnight. At length a light seemed to dawn on him. If he sat on this case he could save an innocent man at all events.
“You will sit, will you not?”
“Yes.”
And then she kissed him.
III
Back at Ballamoar, Stowell found the Deemster’s clerk waiting for him.
It had taken Joshua three days to see Deemster Taubman, and when at length he was admitted to the big man’s presence he had found him in bed, with his shaggy head and unshaven face on the pillow and his lower extremities through the legs of a cane-bottomed chair which supported his bed-clothes.
“What? What’s that?” he had roared. “Sit at the General Gaol? Go back to your master and tell him I’m lying here in the tortures of the damned, not able to put a foot to the ground.”
Stowell drew a long breath. Fate had spoken its last word! It was now certain that he must sit on the case of Bessie Collister.
His spirits rose and he began to see things more clearly. Had he not exaggerated his own importance in this affair? He had been thinking of his part in the forthcoming trial as if the issue of Bessie’s fate depended upon him. But not so. It depended upon the Jury. Guilty or not Guilty, he had nothing to do with that. Therefore, in the deeper sense, Bessie would not be tried by him at all. Why had he been frightening himself?
Had a Judge, then, no power, no voice, no influence? Thank God, yes! It was for the Judge to direct the jury on questions of law, to see that they had a right understanding of it and that their verdict corresponded with the evidence. What an important function especially in a case like this! What a mercy old Taubman was unable to sit on it!
He thought again of Bessie’s position. Pitiful, most pitiful! But the law was no Juggernaut, intended to crush the life out of a poor unfortunate girl. Mercifully administered it was rather her Sanctuary to which she might fly for refuge. And it should be mercifully administered.
Why not? Good heavens, why not? What wrong would it be to temper Justice with mercy even to strain the law a little in the prisoner’s favour? No one but himself would know. And if it were suspected that he was showing favour to the prisoner, people would consider him deserving of praise rather than censure for trying to snatch a young and helpless creature from the clutches of a cruel old Statute.
Besides, was it not one of the higher traditions of the bench that the Judge was first Counsel for the accused? Judges had not always acted on that principle. Some of them, in times past, had hunted their wretched prisoners gallowswards with gibes. Taubman was still like that. He thought sympathy with such women as Bessie Collister was sentimental weakness, that to deal mercifully with them was to encourage them, and thereby do a wrong to public morality.
“God bless me, yes! I know Taubman,” he told himself.
Then he thought of Gell. Whatever Bessie might be, Gell was innocent, and after the girl herself the greatest sufferer. Should he suffer further from an unfounded suspicion? God forbid! It would be his duty as Judge to see that no blustering person in Court bellowed accusations which, once out, might stick to an innocent man for the rest of his natural life.
After that ho thought of himself. The only risk he ran was from Bessie’s despair. If Gell were falsely accused she might break silence and tell the truth to save him. What a vista! Bessie, Gell, himself, Fenella! But no, that should not be! The law was no thumb-screw; a law-court was no torture -chamber. It would be his duty as Judge to protect the girl against any form of legal provocation.
Last of all, with a thrill of the heart, he thought of Fenella. She had drawn him on, constrained and compelled him to promise to sit on Bessie’s case. But she had only wished, out of the greatness of her pity, to see that the poor girl should have a just trial. She should too! It would be his duty as Judge to see to that.
“Good Lord, yes! And what a mercy the case is not coming before Taubman.”
Thus in the scorching fire of his temptation he tried to stand erect in the belief that he had sunk himself in his high office that he was about to become the champion and first servant of Justice. But well he knew in his secret heart that in the fierce struggle which had been going on within him between the Judge and the Man, the Man had conquered.
During the next two days he worked day and night in the library, looking up authorities and verifying references. On the third day he set out in his car for Castletown. Janet saw him off in the mist of early morning. He was very pale; he had eaten scarcely any breakfast. She looked anxiously after him until he disappeared behind the trees. There was the odour of fresh earth in the air and the rooks were calling. It was like an echo from the past.
When he arrived at Castle Rushen there was a crowd at the gate, and all hats were off to him, as they had been to his father, when he passed through the Judge’s private entrance.
Inside the courtyard, where the steps go up to the public part of the Court-house, there was another crowd and a certain commotion. The police were pushing back a tumultuous person who in a raucous voice was demanding to be admitted although the place was full.
It was Dan Baldromma.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE TRIAL
FOR a good hour before the arrival of the Deemster, Castle Rushen had been full of activity. In the Court-house itself, warm with sunshine from the lantern light, Robbie Stephen, the chief Coroner of the island, who looked like a shaggy old sheep-dog, had been selecting candidates for the Jury-box.
Seventy-two of them had been summoned, six from each of twelve parishes, and now he was reducing the number to thirty-two, twelve for the Jury and twenty more to meet the contingency of arbitrary challenging.
Everybody claimed exemption, but the Coroner listened to none. Standing back to the empty bench, swelling with importance and with his seventy-two men huddled together like sheep at one side of the chamber, he called them out at his discretion and with a wave of the hand passed them over to the other side to wait for the trial.
“Now then, Willie Kinnish, thou’rt a good man; over with thee.”
“No, no, Mr. Stephen, you must excuse me to-day, Sir.”
“Tut, tut! You Maughold men haven’t served on a jury these seven years.”
“But I have fifty head of sheep going to Ramsey mart this morning, and what’s to pay my half year’s rent if I’m not there to sell them?”
“Chut, man! Lave that to herself. She’s thy better half, isn’t she?”
Meantime, in the chill corridors underground the jailer and his turnkey were rattling their keys, opening the doors of the cells and shouting to the prisoners to make ready for the Court.
“Patrick Kelly! Charles Quiggin! Nancy Kegeen! John Corlett! Caesar Crow! Robert Quine! Elizabeth Corteen!”
Hearing her name called, Bessie, having no fear, got up from her plank bed, and when Mrs. Mylrea, the woman warder, with her short, loud, difficult breathing, brought back her cloak and fur hat, she put them on leisurely.
“Quick, girl!” said the warder. “You don’t want to keep the Dempster waiting, do you?”
Bessie laughed, but made no answer. At the next moment she was in the darkness of the corridor, walking at the end of a short procession of other prisoners, and at the next she was drawn up, with her prison companions, into the blinding sunlight of a little paved quadrangle which was surrounded by high walls and had the sound of the sea coming down into it from the free world outside.
By this time the Court-house upstairs was in a state of yet greater activity. The thirty-two possible jurymen, having reconciled themselves to being” trapped,” were standing under the jury-box, talking of the weather which was bringing the crops on rapidly and would increase the price of early potatoes. Inspectors of police were bustling about; Joshua Scarff was laying a green portfolio with paper, pens and ink, on the bench in front of the Deemster’s scarlet armchair, and a number of advocates were coming in laughing by a door which communicated with their room off the ramparts.
The last of the advocates to enter was Alick Gell. He took a seat immediately in front of the empty dock, looking pale and worn and scarcely able to hold the papers which he carried in his nervous hands. A little later the Attorney-General, who was to prosecute for the Crown, came in with a grave face, followed by old Hudgeon, his junior, with a sour one. And shortly before eleven (the hour appointed for the beginning of the trial) a lady was brought by an Inspector from the door to the Judge’s room and seated beside Gell in front of the dock. It was Fenella.
Then the outer doors to the courtyard were thrown open and the public admitted. They rushed and tore their way into the Courthouse, men and women together, talking and laughing loudly. The big clock in the Castle tower was heard to strike, and the Inspector, standing near the dais, cried in a loud voice, “Silence in Court!”
The babel of voices subsided and everybody rose who had been seated. Then the Court came in and took their seats on the bench of judgment the Governor in his soldier’s uniform, and Stowell and the Clerk of the Rolls in their Judges’ wigs and gowns.
It was remarked that the new Deemster looked ill and almost old. A wave of sympathy went out to him from the first. It was whispered among the spectators that he had come straight from a sick-bed, and that the Governor had insisted on his presence, saying he must have him “dead or alive.”
“Coroner, fence the Court,” said the Governor, and then old Stephen, who had already taken his place in the Coroner’s box, raising the pitch of his voice, recited the ancient formula:
“I do hereby fence this Court in the name of our Sovereign Lord the King. I charge that no person shall quarrel, bawl or molest the audience, that all persons shall answer to their names when called. I charge this audience to witness that this Court is fenced; I charge this audience to witness that this Court is fenced; I charge this whole audience to witness that this Court is fenced.”
Everybody knew that it was for the Deemster to speak next, but for a sensible moment he did not do so. Then he said, almost beneath his breath, “Let the prisoners be brought in.”
In the continued silence there came the sound of bustle outside, with the patter of feet on the pavement below, and then a shuffling of steps on the stairs. The prisoners were coming up, but the police had difficulty in clearing a passage for them. The voice of the jailer, Tommy Vondy, was heard to cry, “Make way!” There was a period of waiting. At one moment the people in court caught the sound from the staircase of a scarcely believable thing the laugh of a woman? Who could she be?
At length the prisoners were brought in, pushed through the throng that stood thick at the back, and hurried into the dock, which was like a long pew behind the circular seats of the advocates and directly in front of the bench.
There were seven of them, a sorry company, two women and five men, with nothing in common save the pallid, almost pasty complexions which had come of the dank air they had been living in.
There was another moment of silence. It was time for the Deemster to take the pleas, but again he did not speak immediately. He had the look of a man who was struggling against physical weakness. The blood rushed to his pale face and as quickly disappeared. “He’s not fit for it to-day,” people whispered.
But at the next moment, in a low voice, and with the appearance of one who was making an effort to command his strength, the Deemster was reading the indictments.
He took the prisoners in the order in which they stood before him, beginning with the one on the extreme left. He was a very young man, almost a boy, with a face that might have been that of his mother when she was a girl. His name was Quiggin; he had been a bank clerk and was charged with embezzlement. He pleaded Guilty and looked down as if he expected the earth to open under his feet.
The next was a gross, fat, middle-aged woman with red cheeks and many heavy gold rings on her stubby fingers. Her name was Kegeen, and she was charged with robbing drunken sailors in a house she had kept in an alley off the south quay. In a torrent of words she denied everything and accused the police of blackmailing her.
The last was Bessie Collister and the Deemster paused perceptibly when he came to her.
She had carried herself straight when she entered the Court and was now sitting with her head thrown back. But, seeing that of all the prisoners she was the one on whom the eyes of the spectators were fastened, she had reached up her hands to a veil which was wrapped about her fur hat and drawn it down over her face. Observing this at the last moment, and thinking it the cause of the Deemster’s silence, the jailer said in an audible whisper, “Put up your fall, Bessie.”
She did so, disclosing her thin white face and large eyes. And then in a voice so low that it would have been scarcely audible but for the strained silence in the court-house, the Deemster said, “Elizabeth Corteen, stand up.”
Bessie rose without embarrassment and fixed her eyes on the Deemster. And then he charged her.
“It is charged against you that on or about the fifth day of April in the parish of Ballaugh, in the Isle of Man, feloniously, wilfully and of your malice aforethought, you did kill and murder a certain male child, contrary to the form of the Statute in such case made and provided, and against the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King, his Crown and dignity. How say you, are you guilty or not guilty?”
