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!

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!

The light was then clearing, and raising his eyes he saw on the south beach a one-story fisherman's cottage from which the smoke was rising. It was Mrs. Quayle's cottage. She was making her early breakfast, and presently she would go to his room to make his. He shuddered at a vision of what she would find there--the close air, the gas fire, the girl's blouse on the floor, the girl herself .... how degrading it all was!

He saw Dan Baldromma ferreting out the facts (as of course he would, having to find excuses for his own barbarity), and then blazoning them abroad to his own disgrace and the discredit of his class. Or worse--a hundredfold worse--holding them as a threat over his father. What a disgusting bog he had strayed into!

He saw the truth leaking out one way or other and putting an end to his career at the bar. It was not the same here as in the greater communities, where a man might commit a fault and then submerge it in the fathomless tide of life. In this little island, where everybody knew everybody, it was the man himself who was submerged.

If the story of last night became known to anyone it would become known to everyone, from the Governor himself to the meanest beggar on the roads. No position of honour or authority would ever be possible to him after that. The black fact would be a clanking chain which he would have to drag after him as long as he lived.

When he thought of this--that the event of one night might alter the whole course of his life, and bring scandal upon the Deemster, and that it was due to a miserable accident in the first instance--the accident of meeting Bessie on the streets after midnight--he was filled with a fierce and consuming rage, and for one bad moment he had an almost uncontrollable desire to return to his rooms and drive her out of them.

That horrified him. He hated himself for it, and after a while his self-pity gave place to pity for the girl.

"Good heavens, what are my risks compared to hers?" he asked himself.

The poor girl had so many excuses. Back in the past, before she was born even, she had been condemned and branded, and the damned hypocritical world had been deepening the injury every day since. If he had found her in the streets it was only because her brutal step-father had turned her from his door. And if she had come into his rooms it was because she had no other shelter.

She had been a good girl too. No other man had been allowed to lead her astray. He could hear her voice still, repeating his own words after him: "You _will_ stand up for me, won't you?" and he had promised that he would. He could not cast her off now without being a scoundrel. Could the son of Deemster Stowell be a scoundrel?

"No, by God!"

A few minutes later he saw himself going back to Bessie and saying, "Look here, my dear girl. It was neither your fault nor mine, but take this, and this, and remember if you ever find it is not enough, there'll be more where that comes from."

But no, he could not do that either. If he made the girl take money he would put her in the position of a harlot; and once a woman accepted that position there was no bottom to the unguessed depths to which she might descend.

Bessie's future stood up before him like a spectre. Other men, each more brutal than the last, quarrels, violence, all the miseries of such a life--until some day, perhaps, some hideous fact with which he had had nothing to do, would look at him with accusing eyes and say,

"You are responsible for this, because you were the first."

Down to that moment he had been thinking of the event of last night as a blunder, but now he saw it as a crime. To prevent the possible consequences of that crime he must keep the girl with him, take care of her, protect her as the saying was.

But no, that was impossible also. Justification for such a relation there might be--no doubt was--where law or custom or other impediment were keeping apart a man and woman who belonged together. But to put a girl into the position of a mistress, because she was unworthy to be a wife, and to hide her away behind a curtain of duplicity and lies, was to destroy her body and soul.

Again Bessie's future stood up before him as a spectre--that high-spirited girl who, but for him, might have married a decent man of her own class, and held her head proud, declining, after a few vain months of fine clothes and idleness, to the condition of a slattern, and going down to the dirt and degeneration of drink.

And then he saw that what had happened last night was not merely a crime--it was a sin.

But what was he to do? What? What?

Just at that moment the sun had come up out of the sea in crimsoning clouds, and the white mist that is the shroud of night had risen above the houses of the town, the steeples of the churches, the hills and the mountain tops, and was vanishing away in that new birth of morning light that is the world's daily resurrection.

"I know! I know!" he thought, and he leapt to his feet.

He had remembered something that Janet had said about the men of his family--that it had always been a kind of religion with them to do the right. Four hundred years of the Ballamoars and not a stain on the name of any of them! That was something to be born to, wasn't it? It was worth all the titles and honours the world had in it.

And then, in that moment of strange and solemn splendour, when the things of the other world appear to be as real as the things of this one, it seemed as if the Ballamoars were calling to him! Four hundred years of the dead Ballamoars were calling to the last of their sons--"_Do the right!_"

"I must marry that girl," he told himself.

But at the next moment there came, with the shock of a blow, the memory of his mother.

Marriage had always been associated in his mind with such different conditions. Such a different woman; somebody who would be your equal, perhaps your superior; somebody who would sustain and inspire you; somebody who would help you feel the throbbing pulse of life, and listen to all the suffering hearts that beat; somebody who, if she had to go before you, would leave behind her, for as long as your life should last, the fragrance of flowers and the halo of a holy saint.

That was marriage as he had always thought of it. And now this girl--illiterate, inadequate, with that mother, that father .... in the presence of the Deemster .... the home of Isobel Stanley .... Oh, God!

Then a mocking voice seemed to say,

"Good Lord, what a joke! If every man who ever made a tragic blunder (there have been hundreds of thousands of you) had acted on your exaggerated sense of responsibility, what a mess the old world would be in by this time! Why, there is scarcely a man alive who would not laugh at you and call you a fool."

"Let them," he thought, for louder at that moment than any other voice was the voice that cried,

"_Do the right!_"

The marriage need not take place immediately. Bessie could be educated. She was bright; there was no saying how quickly she might develop. That would soften the blow to his father, and anyhow the Deemster would see that he was trying to be true to his blood, his race.

"Yes, yes, I must do the right; whatever it may cost me."

But then came another chilling thought. Love! There could be no love in such a marriage. This brought, with the pain of a bleeding wound, the memory of Fenella.

In spite of all he had said to himself through so many years he had never really been reconciled to the loss of her. Down in some dark and secret chamber of his consciousness there had always been a phantom hope that notwithstanding her devotion to her work for women, and the dedication to celibacy (as stern as the consecration of the veil) which she believed to be demanded by it, Fenella would return to the island, and his great love would be rewarded.

That had been the real cause of his idleness. He had been waiting, waiting, waiting for Fenella to come back and make it worth while .... and now .... by his own act .... the consequences of it .... Oh, God! Oh, God!

For the first time, save once since he was a child, he felt tears in his eyes, but he brushed them away impatiently.

"It's too late to think of that now," he thought.

A duty claimed him. He must put such dreams away. Besides where was the merit of doing the right if you had not to sacrifice something? Love might be the light of life, but men and women all the world over had for one reason or other to marry without it. Millions of hearts in all ages were like old battlefields, with dead things, which nobody knew of, lying about in the dark places. And yet the world went on.

He might have struggles, heart-aches, heart-hunger, and more than he could do to keep the pot boiling, with the fire out and the hearth cold, but nobody need know anything about that. This girl need never know. Fenella need never know. Nobody need know. It was a matter for himself only.

"Yes, yes, I must do the right," he kept on saying, "whatever it may cost me."

Having arrived at this decision he felt an immense relief and got up to go back.

The windows of the town were reflecting the morning sun and the smoke was rising from the chimneys. He saw an elderly woman, with a little shawl pinned over her head and under her chin, trudging along past the storm-cone station on the other side of the harbour. It was Mrs. Quayle, on her way to his rooms. But he shuddered no longer at the thought of her. She was a good creature and when she heard what he meant to do she would help him with the care of Bessie.

As he walked towards the town he told himself he had another reason now for setting to work in earnest--he had to justify what he was going to do in the eyes of the island and of the Deemster. Therefore the event of last night might be a good thing after all, little as he had thought so.

At the mouth of the bridge he met the harbour-master, whose face wore a look of dismay.

"This is a ter'ble shocking thing that has happened in the night, Mr. Stowell."

Stowell caught his breath and asked "What?"

"Why, the light-house. Struck by lightning in the storm. Didn't you see it, Sir?"

"Oh yes, of course, certainly."

"I'm just after telegraphing to the Governor and the Receiver-General. The old light has gone out with the tide, Sir, and it will be middlin' bad for the boats coming in at night until we get a new one."

"It will, Captain, it will. Good-morning!"

His eyes were positively shining with joy as he walked sharply through the town, and as he opened his door he was saying to himself again,

"I must do the right, _whatever_ it may cost me."

He was closing the door on the inside when he saw in the letter-box the letter which had caught his eye last night. Now he could open it.

It was marked "Immediate." Recognising the Ballamoar crest and Janet's handwriting, he trembled and turned pale.

"A line in frantic haste, dear, to say I have just heard from
Miss Green that Fenella is crossing by the steamer due to arrive
at eight o'clock this evening. She has left her Settlement and
is coming back to stay in the island for good. I thought you
might like to go up to Douglas to meet her. Trust me, dear, she
will be simply delighted.

"Robbie Creer is taking this into town by hand, so that you may
receive it at the earliest possible moment. I am frightfully
excited, and oh, so glad and happy."

Stowell reeled and laid hold of the hand-rail. And when at length he went upstairs he staggered as if he were carrying a crushing load.

END OF FIRST BOOK

_SECOND BOOK_

THE RECKONING