Chapter NINE: The Master of Man

Dan Baldromma's meeting in the market-place had not been the success he had expected. Standing on the steps of the town lamp, between the Saddle Inn and the Ship Store, he had discoursed on the rights of the labourer to the land he cultivated.

The Earth was the Lord's, and the fulness thereof. Therefore it could not belong to the big ones who were adding field to field--least of all to their wastrels of sons who were doing nothing but hang about the roads and the glens to ruin the daughters of decent men. The moral of this was that the land belonged to the people and the time was coming when they would pay no rent for it.

Dan's audience of Manx farmers had listened to this new gospel with Manx stolidity, but a group of young English visitors, clerks from the cotton factories, looking down from the balcony of the Saddle Inn, had received it with open derision.

Dan had ignored their opposition as long as possible, merely saying, when his audience laughed at their sallies,

"We must make allowance for some ones, comrades--children still, they've not been rocked enough."

But when at length they had called him Bradlaugh Junior and Ingersoll the Second and told him to keep his tongue off better men, Dan had looked up at the balcony and cried,

"If you're calling me by them honoured names I'm taking my hat off to you" (suiting the action to the word), "but if you're saying you are better men we'll be going into a back coort somewheres and taking off our jackets and westcots."

To preserve the peace the police had had to put an end to the meeting, whereupon Dan, spitting contemptuously and snorting about "The Cottonies" and "the Cotton balls," had harnessed his horse at the Plough Inn and driven home in a dull rage.

It had been ten o'clock when he got back to Baldromma, and after unharnessing his horse in his undrained stable, and wiping his best boots with a wisp of straw, he had stepped round to the kitchen.

His wife was there, beating time on the hearthstone to a long-drawn Methodist hymn while she stirred the porridge in a pot that hung over a slow peat fire.

"_Tell me the old, old story, ....
Of Jesus and His love._"

"Your daughter isn't back then?" said Dan with a growl.

"Be raisonable, man," said Mrs. Collister. "Eleven o'clock thou said, and it's only a piece after ten yet."

She poured out the porridge and hobbled to the dairy for a basin of milk, and then Dan, after a sour silence, sat down to his supper.

"They were telling me in Ramsey," he said, making noises with his spoon, "that the Spaker's son went up to Douglas to-day."

"Like enough!" said Mrs. Collister.

"I'll go bail your girl went up to meet him."

"Sakes alive, man veen, what for should thou be saying that?"

"She's fit enough for it anyway."

"But what has the girl done? Twenty-four years for Spring and not a man at her yet."

"Chut! Once they cut the cables that sort is the worst that's going. She'd be an angel itself though to stand up against a waistrel like yander."

"Bessie will be home for eleven," said Mrs. Collister.

"She'd better, or she'll find Dan Baldromma a man of his word, ma'am."

After that there was another sour silence in which both watched the open-faced clock whose pendulum swung by the wall. Tick, tick tick, said the clock. To the man it was going slowly, to the woman it seemed to fly. But hardly had the fingers pointed to eleven, or the chain begun to shake for the first stroke of the hour, when Dan was at the door, bolting and locking it.

"Will thou not give the girl a few minutes' grace, even?"

"Not half a minute."

"But the ten train hasn't whistled at the bridge yet."

"I've nothing to do with trains, Misthress Collister. Eleven o'clock, I said, and now it's eleven and better."

"But surely thou'll never shut thy door on a poor girl in the middle of the night?"

"There's others that's open to her--she said so herself, remember. She's not for coming home to-night, so take your candle and get to bed, woman."

"But the train must be late--I'll wait up myself for her."

"You might burn your candle to the snuff--she's not for coming, I tell you."

"But she promised me--faithfully promised me...."

"Get to bed, ma'am. I wonder you're not thinking shame, making excuses for the bad doings of your by-child, and you a Methodist."

The woman was on the verge of tears.

"Shame enough it is, Dan Collister, when a mother has to shut her heart to her own child if she's not to show disrespect to her husband."

In the intimacy of the bedroom Dan threw off all disguise. Winding his silver-lever watch and hanging it with its Albert on a hook in the bed-post, and then sitting on the side of the bed to undress, he almost crowed over his prospects. That son of the Speaker would have to pay for his whistle this time! Baldromma would be his by heirship, and a father had a right to damages for the loss of the services of his daughter.

"There'll be no more rent going paying by me, I'm thinking," said Dan.

So that was his scheme! Mrs. Collister stood long in her cotton nightdress, fumbling with the strings of her night-cap, and wondering if she could ever lie down with the man again.

"Are you never for putting out that candle and coming to bed, woman?"

Half-an-hour passed and the mother lay still and listened. Dan was asleep by this time and breathing audibly, but there was no sound outside save the slipping of the water from the fixed wheel and the stamping of the horse in the stable. At last came the whistling of the train, and a few minutes later, Bessie's step on the "street" and then the rattling of the latch of the kitchen door.

Mrs. Collister tried to slip out of bed without awakening Dan, but her sciatica had made her limbs stiff and she knocked over the candlestick that stood on a chair beside her. This awakened her husband, and hearing the noise downstairs, he rolled out of bed, saying, in a threatening voice,

"Lie thou there--I'll settle her."

He went out to the stairhead, slamming the bedroom door behind him, threw up the sash of a window on the landing, and shouted into the darkness:

"Who's there?"

"Me, of course," cried Bessie.

A fierce altercation followed, in which Dan's voice was harsh and coarse, and Bessie's shrill with anger.

"Then find your bed where you've found your company," shouted Dan. And shutting down the window with a crash he returned to the bedroom.

The mother heard Bessie going off, and the fading sound of the girl's footsteps tore her terribly. But after a few minutes more Dan was making noise in his nostrils again and she got up and crept downstairs to the kitchen (where the dull red of the dying turf left just enough light to see by), slid the bolts back noiselessly, opened the door and called in a whisper:

"Bessie!"

No answer came back to her, so she stepped out to the end of the cobbled way, barefooted and in her nightdress and nightcap, and called again:

"Bessie! Bessie!"

Still there was no reply; so she returned to the kitchen, leaving the door on the latch, and sat for a long hour in a rocking chair by the hearth (souvenir of the days when Bessie was a child, and she had rocked her to sleep in it), fighting, in the misery of her heart, with the black thought which Dan had put there.

At length she remembered Susie and persuaded herself that Bessie must have gone to the Ginger Hall to sleep.

"Yes, Bessie must have gone to Susie."

Being comforted by this thought, and feeling cold, for the fire had gone out, she crept upstairs. It was hard to go by Bessie's room on the landing. Every night for years she had stopped there on her way to bed. And in the winter, when the wind in the trees in the glen made a roar like the sea, she had called through the closed door: "Art thou warm enough, Bessie, or will I bring thee my flannel petticoat?" And now the door was open and the room was empty!

Dan was still asleep when she got back to the bedroom and her approach did not awaken him, so she fumbled her way to the bed (knowing where she was when her feet touched the warm sheepskin that lay by the side of it) and then opened the clothes and crept in.

The cold air she brought with her awakened Dan, and he turned on the pillow and said,

"You've not been letting in that girl of yours, have you?"

"No!"

Dan made a grunt of satisfaction, and then said, with his face to the wall,

"Remember, you'll have to be up early to milk for yourself in the morning."

"Yes."

Then came a yawn, and then a snore, and then silence fell on the little house.

II

Bessie had run all the way to the station and then found that the train had nearly half-an-hour to wait for the passengers by the last of the day's steamers. The carriages were full of English visitors, but there were very few Manx people and she could not see Susie anywhere. This vexed her with the thought of having to tear herself away a good hour earlier than anybody else. It was all her mother's fault--getting her to make that ridiculous promise.

From such thoughts, as the train ran into the country, her mind swung back to the memory of Stowell. She recalled his looks, his smile, his whole person, and every word he had said to her down to the moment of that burning kiss.

What pleased her most was the certainty that he had never kissed a girl before. The trembling of his lips, when they were lip to lip, told her that. And in spite of all that had been said of him she was sure he had never had a woman in his arms until to-night--never!

And she? Well, she had never before been kissed by a man. Alick Gell? She was only a child then. Kiss-in-the-ring at Michael Fair? Chut! A girl felt that no more than the wind blowing over her bare cheek.

By the clocks at the wayside stations she saw she was going to be late getting home, but she didn't care. Dan Baldromma wasn't fool enough to shut her out. But let him if he liked to! Where would he go to get another girl to work for her wages--summer and winter, as if the creatures had been her own, up all hours calving, and out before the dawn in the lambing season, when the hoar-frost was on the fields?

It was twenty minutes past eleven when she got down at the glen station, and there was Susie getting down also! Susie was in the sulks. Not only had Bessie deliberately lost her in the dancing-hall, but after she had hurried away to catch the ten train, knowing Bessie had promised to return by it, she had had to come back alone!

This added to Bessie's vexation, and when she reached the house, and found the door locked on her, it expressed itself in her hand when she rattled the kitchen latch.

Then came the scene with Dan Baldromma who shouted down at her from the upper window as if she had been a thief--it was suffocating! And when he said, "Find your bed where you've found your company," and banged down the sash on her, she flung away, crying, as well as she could for the anger that was choking her,

"So I will, and you'll be sorry for it some day."

At that moment she meant to sleep with Susie at the Ginger Hall Inn, and offer herself next day to one or other of the farmers who had so often asked for her. But she had not gone many steps before she reflected that all the farmers' houses would be full now and nobody could take her in until Michaelmas.

No matter! She might have been no better off. Those old farmers were all the same. If it wasn't the bullying of brutes like Dan Baldromma it was the meanness of old hypocrites like Teare of Lezayre, who laid foundation stones, and put purses of money on top of them, and then went home and gave his girls cold potatoes and salt herrings for supper!

That made her think of young Willie Teare. She had met him in Ramsey the day before, when he had said he was tired of slaving for his father, and meant to set up in a farm for himself as soon as he could find the right wife. But no thank you, no marrying with a farmer for her! After a woman had worn herself to the bone, keeping things together and gathering the stock, and she was doubled up with sciatica, and ought to be in bed, with somebody to wait on her, the husband was nagging and ragging her from morning to night. That was marriage! Hadn't she seen enough of it?

Bessie had reached the Ginger Hall by this time, and, seeing a light in Susie's window, she was about to call up when (with Dan's insult 'Find your bed, etc.' still rankling in her mind) a startling thought seized her and made her heart leap and the hot blood to rush through and through her. There was one way to escape from Dan Baldromma and his tyrannies--Mr. Stowell!

Mr. Stowell would return by the last train to Ramsey, having bachelor rooms there, in which he lived alone--so people were saying. If she were to meet him on his arrival and tell him what had happened he would find some way out for her. Of course he would! She was sure he would!

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--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 bookcase 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 in 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 his, 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.