Chapter TWENTY-SIX: The Wind and the Whirlwind

Next day the insular newspapers announced that the new Deemster, on his return home from Castletown, after the ceremony of his swearing-in, had had a sudden seizure. A heavy fall had been heard by the servants, and they had found their master lying on the floor of the library, unconscious.

Early in the morning Robbie Creer had driven into town for Dr. Clucas, who had ordered rest--absolute rest.

"We must have three full days in bed, Mr. Stowell, Sir. And if it is necessary to postpone the Court of General Gaol Delivery, I think .... I really think we must ask his Excellency to do so."

Stowell drew a deep breath and fell asleep. When he awoke it was mid-day. He was in bed in his father's bedroom and Fenella was sitting by his side, holding his hand. After he had opened his eyes she leaned over him and kissed him, saying in a soft voice that he would soon be better.

"It was that oath-taking, dear. I could see you were taking it too seriously."

His heart was still warm with the embraces of yesterday, yet he tried in vain to kiss her back. But he laughed a little and made light of his seizure. It was nothing, but a little dizziness; he would be about again in a day or two.

"Would you like me to stay and nurse you?"

"No, no! .... I mean you needn't...."

His stammering broke down and his face gloomed, but with a quick smile she said,

"Oh, very well, Sir, if you won't have me, Janet will take care of you, and send me a telegram night and morning to say how you are. Won't you, Janet?"

From some unseen place behind the curtains of the four-poster, Janet, snuffling and blowing her nose, answered that she would.

"And now I'll be wishing you good-morning, Sir," said Fenella, making (after another kiss) a stately curtsey to him as he lay in bed.

The sounds of the wheels of the Governor's carriage having died off on the drive, Stowell found himself alone and face to face with a tragic problem--what was he to do about the trial of Bessie Collister?

This, then, was the case Fenella had written about while he was in London. Why had he not thought of it before? He could not pretend that he had never had misgivings. Again and again the evil shadow of a dread possibility had crossed his mind like a vanishing dream at the moment of awakening.

He had put it aside, banished it, explained it away to himself. In the fullness of his happiness he had even forgotten it altogether. But Nature did not forget. And now his sin had fallen on him like an avalanche--fallen as only an avalanche falls, when the sky is blue, the air is warm and the sun is shining.

He had no doubt about Bessie's guilt. But what about his own? And if he were guilty (in the second degree), being the first cause of the girl's crime, how could he sit in judgment upon her?

To try his own victim, to question her, to go through the mockery of weighing the evidence against her, to condemn her, to sentence her--it would be impossible, utterly impossible, contrary to all legal usage, a violation of the spirit if not the letter of his oath in his first hour as a Judge.

And then the human side of it--the terror, the peril! That poor girl in the dock, in the depths of her shame and the throes of her temptation, while he, her fellow sinner....

No, no, no! It would not only be a crime against Justice; it would be a sin against God.

Joshua Scarff came in the afternoon. Standing by the bed, and looking down through his dark spectacles, he said,

"This is a pity, your Honour! A great pity! Such interesting cases! Your Honour must have wished to study them before sitting in Court."

"Joshua," said Stowell (he was breathing hard and speaking with difficulty), "go to Deemster Taubman, tell him what has happened, and say that if, as a great favour, he can take the Court next week, I shall be eternally grateful."

The Deemster's clerk was almost speechless with dismay. His Honour's first Court! Pity! Great pity!

But Stowell felt an immense relief. Thank God, there was another Deemster to fall back upon. He need not break the spirit of his oath. Bad as the event was at the best, at least there need be no Conflict between his private interests and his public duty.

II

Stowell, in spite of Dr. Clucas, got up next morning. He was sitting before the fire in the library when Janet came in to say that Mrs. Collister of Baldromma was asking to see the Deemster. She had come to plead for her daughter--that girl who was to be tried for killing her baby.

"I told her she shouldn't have come here and that the old Deemster would never have seen her. But it's pitiful to see the poor thing. She is lame, too, and has walked all the way. What am I to say to her?"

Stowell struggled with himself for a moment, and then, with an embarrassed utterance said,

"Let her come in."

"This is very wrong of you, Mrs. Collister" (he was trying to keep a firm lip and to speak severely); "you know it is against all rule."

The old woman, trembling and wiping her eyes, said she knew it was, but she had known his father. There had been none like him--no, not the whole island over. He had been every poor person's friend. If anybody had been injured she had only to draw to him for refuge and he had protected her. And if any poor girl had gone wrong, and broken the law, perhaps, it was the big man himself who was always there to show her mercy.

"That's why I thought maybe his son, if he had his father's heart .... and people are saying he has too .... maybe his son wouldn't send a poor mother away when she's in trouble and has nobody else to go to."

"Sit down, Mrs. Collister."

The old woman sat in the chair which Janet turned for her, and began on her story.

"It's about Bessie."

She had always been a good girl. No mother ever had a better. And if people were saying she had been in trouble before, might the Lord forgive them when their own time came, for it was lies they were putting on the girl.

"And if she's in trouble now, your Honour, it's like it's not all her own fault neither."

First there was her father. He had been shocking hard on the girl, shutting her out of the house in the dark of night and so throwing her into the way of temptation.

"Until they lay me under the sod I'll never get it out of my ears, Sir---the sound of her foot going off on the street."

And when the girl came home again, looking that weak that it seemed as if the world wasn't willing to stand under her, the father had taunted her with coming back to eat them up, and maybe bringing another mouth to feed.

"So if she did the terrible shocking thing they're saying .... I don't know if she did, your Honour .... I don't know if she ever left the dairy loft from the minute I took her up to it until Cain the constable (may the Lord forgive him!) came dragging her down .... but if she did, it's like it was because the poor child was alone in the dark midnight, and out of herself entirely, and not knowing what she was doing, and perhaps freckened of what the old man would be saying in the morning."

Stowell was silent. The old woman cried softly to herself for a moment and then said,

"Nobody knows what that is, your Honour, except them that has gone through it."

Then she wiped her eyes, one after another, and said she could not sleep "a wink on the night," lying in her white bed and thinking of Bessie where she was now. And having read "in class" last evening how the Lord heard the cry of Hagar for her son in the wilderness she had thought his Honour might hear her cry for her daughter.

Stowell knew that his feelings as a man were getting the better of his duty as a Judge, so he tried to be severe with the old woman, telling her she had no right to come to him, and that he had done wrong to listen to her.

"In fact I could not have received you at all but for one thing--I am not going to try your daughter's case."

The old woman was appalled.

"Do you mean, Sir, that you'll not be trying Bessie?"

"No, Deemster Taubman will probably do so."

At that the old woman broke into a flood of tears.

"Aw dear! Aw dear! And me praying on my knees on the kitchen floor that the Lord would bring you back in time from London--someones being so hard on poor girls in trouble!"

Again Stowell was silent, and for some moments nothing was heard but the woman's broken sobs. At length, unable to bear any longer the sight of the old mother's disappointment, he said he would do what he could for her. If he could not sit on her daughter's case he would write to Deemster Taubman, explaining her condition and describing her temptations.

"God bless you for that," cried the old woman. And then Janet said it was time to go, his Honour being unwell.

"May the Lord give him health and strength and long life, ma'am!"

People were right when they were telling her he had his father's heart. He had too. She was going out of the room with hope kindled, when she said,

"You must excuse a poor woman if she did wrong in coming to you, Sir."

"We'll say no more about that now," said Stowell. "Go home and rest, mother."

At that word the old woman broke down utterly. But after a moment her weak eyes shone and she said,

"Bessie is not your quality, Sir, but if she gets off she'll write to thank you."

"No, no! She must never do that," said Stowell.

"Come now, Mrs. Collister," said Janet.

But having reached the door, the old woman turned her wet face, and seeing the portrait of Stowell's mother on the wall, and mistaking it for that of Fenella, she said,

"They're telling me you're to be married soon, your Honour. May the Lord give you peace and love in your own home, and that's better than gold or lands, Sir."

Stowell tried to reply, but he could only wave his hand and turn to the window as the old woman left the room.

Why not? What sin against God would it be to unite this suffering woman to her suffering daughter, if he could do so without wronging Justice?

A moment afterwards Janet came back wiping her eyes.

"Oh, these mothers! They're fit enough to break one's heart, Victor."

III

Stowell was in the dining-room next day when he heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs on the drive, and, a moment later, a voice in the hall, saying,

"The Deemster will see _me_, Jane."

It was Alick Gell. His tall figure was more bent than usual; his hair was disordered; his eyes glittered; he was deeply agitated.

"Excuse me, old fellow. You know why I've not been here before. It's Bessie. I'm busy every hour, getting up her case. Awful, isn't it? I can't make myself believe it even yet. Sometimes in the middle of the night I hear myself crying 'Good God, it can't be true!'"

Stowell could scarcely find voice to reply. He remembered what he had advised Fenella to get Gell to do. Had Bessie told him?"

"I received Fenella's letter and of course I am taking up the defence. I've seen Bessie, too, and arranged everything. She's innocent and I'll fight for her to the last breath in my body. But look here--read this," he said, dragging a crumbled newspaper from his pocket, and handing it to Stowell with a trembling hand.

It was a copy of the day's insular paper containing a paragraph which said that the continued illness of the new Deemster would probably prevent him from presiding at the forthcoming sitting of the Court of General Gaol Delivery.

"That's the first edition. When it was published at twelve o'clock I couldn't wait until the afternoon train, so I hired a horse from Fargher, the jobmaster, and I've galloped all the way. Don't tell me it's true."

Stowell answered in a low tone that perhaps it might have to be, whereupon Gell made a cry of dismay.

"Then God help my poor girl! It will be Taubman, and she'll not have a dog's chance with him."

Taubman was a brute--especially in cases of this kind. What did people say about him--that when he saw a woman in the dock he was like a cat who had seen a rat? It was true. He was always bullying the juries who showed humanity to girls in trouble.

"The infernal old blockhead! He has rheumatism in the legs, they say. I wish to heaven he had it in his throat, and it would choke him."

And then the barbarous old Statute! Practically repealed in every other country, but still capable of operation in the Isle of Man. Think of it! Five years, ten years, fifteen years--even death itself, perhaps!

"Stowell, we are old chums .... it's not right of me, I know that .... but for the sake of our old friendship, sit on Bessie's case yourself."

Stowell felt as if he were on the edge of a precipice. Abysmal depths lay before him at the next step. With an awful secret in his heart he felt that it was almost impossible to speak one word more without betraying himself. He was silent, for a moment while Gell stood over him with wild eyes which he had never seen before. At length he said,

"Bessie is to plead Not Guilty?"

"Certainly."

"Will she stick to that?"

"Undoubtedly. Why shouldn't she? Besides, she has given me her promise."

Again Stowell was silent for a moment; then he said,

"I cannot promise to conduct the Court, but if Taubman will do so, and I'm fit to sit with him, I'll .... I'll see she has a fair trial."

Gell made a shout of joy.

"That's good enough for me. Just like you, old fellow."

He snatched up his cap--a different man in a moment.

"I must get back to town now. I have the witnesses to arrange for. Not too many of them unfortunately. There's the mother, she's all right, but not likely to be good in the box. I'm not calling the step-father. It seems he's giving the case away in the glen. The damned old blackguard! I should like to break his ugly neck. I jolly well will, too, one of these days. But Bessie will clear herself. Since she's going to be my wife she must leave the Court without a stain. Good-bye and God bless you, old chap! .... No, no, don't come to the door." (Stowell was for seeing him out.) "Take care of yourself. Good men are scarce. And then you've got to be fit for the Court, you know. By-bye!"

Stowell watched him from the window as he rode down the drive on his tired horse, patting its neck and encouraging it with cheery cries.

Now he understood why Bessie had held off while Gell had wished to marry her. It had been a case of the wife of the Peel fisherman over again, with the difference that Bessie (to avoid the danger of deceiving her husband) had made away with her child before marriage instead of after it. Wild, foolish, frantic scheme! Yet what courage! What strength! What affection!

But if, under Taubman's searching questions, the conspiracy of love should fail, and Bessie's defence should collapse, and Gell should see that she had deceived him, and that _he_ too....

No, no, that must not be! After all, what outrage on Justice would it be to keep a case like this out of the hands of a cold-blooded inhuman legal machine who would commit more crime than he punished?

Still standing by the window, Stowell heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs on the high road. Gell, in high spirits, was galloping home.

IV

Later in the day Stowell was alone in the library reading the Depositions. In his secret heart he knew that a wicked temptation had come to him--the temptation to get Bessie off, and to stop the flood of evil which would surely follow if Deemster Taubman tried her and she were condemned. But all the same he was struggling to drown his qualms in contempt of the case against her.

How little there was to it! The direct evidence was almost childish. The medical testimony was the only thing of consequence, but how sloppy, how inconclusive! Was there anything against Bessie which he, if he had been the advocate for the defence, could not have riddled with as many holes as there were in a cullender? Then why shouldn't he sit on her case?

Guilty? Perhaps she was; but, even so, was it not the theory of the law that she had to be proved guilty--that a prisoner should have a fair legal trial and be convicted or acquitted according to the evidence before the Court? Why shouldn't he?

Suddenly he became aware of a tumult at the front door. Somebody was bawling in a loud voice,

"I'll see the Dempster if I have to shout the house down."

It was Dan Baldromma. Stowell stepped into the hall and said to the housemaid, who was barring the door against the intruder,

"Let him come in, Jane."

Dan, with his short, gross figure, rolled into the house without remembering to take his hat off.

"Well, what do you want?" said Stowell--he was quivering with anger.

"I want to know what is to be done for me?" said Dan.

"For you?"

"For my daughter then--my step-daughter, I mane."

When he had seen Mr. Sto'll last--it was at his office in Ramsey--he had warned him that the man who had got his daughter into disgrace had got to marry her. But had he? No! He had refused--he must have done. And that was the reason why she did what they say. But, behold you, who was being blamed for it? Himself! Yes, people were looking black at him and saying he had thrown the girl into the way of temptation.

That was not the worst of it either. He had expected dacent tratement about the farm when he became father-in-law to the man who would come into it by heirship. But now the girl was in Castle Rushen, and if they sent her over the water the Spaker would be turning him out of house and home.

"He's after threatening it already--to show me the road at Hollantide .... What's that you say, Sir? Thinking of myself, am I? Maybe I am, then, and what for shouldn't I? Near is my shirt but nearer is my skin, they're saying."

Stowell, swept by gusts of passion, was doing his best to control himself.

"Well, what have you come to me for?" he asked.

Dan thrust forward his thick neck with his bull-like gesture, and said,

"To tell you to get her off."

"Even if she is guilty?"

"Chut! Who's to know that if the Coorts acquit her? They are wayses and wayses. Lawyers are mortal clever at twisting the law when they're wanting to. You're Dempster now; and the bosom friend of the man that got my girl into this trouble has got to get her out of it."

"So," said Stowell, breathing hard, "you have come to ask me to degrade Justice" (Dan made a grunt of contempt), "not to save the girl but to protect you--you and your rag of a character?"

Dan drew himself up with a short laugh, half bitter and half triumphant.

"Rag, is it? Take care what you're saying, Mr. Sto'll, Sir. You may be a big man in the island now, but there's them that's bigger and that's the people."

Stowell pointed with a quivering hand to the clock on the landing, and said,

"Look at that clock. If you're not out of this house in one minute...."

Dan's laugh rose to a cry of derision.

"So that's it, is it? That's what the first Justice of the Peace in the Isle of Man is, eh? Son of the ould Dempster too! The grand ould holy saint as they're...."

But before he could finish, Stowell, with a shout that drowned Dan's laugh as if it had been the whimper of a baby girl, laid hold of the man by the collar of his coat and the slack of his trousers and flung him out of the open door and clashed it after him.

Dan, who had rolled and tossed and bumped on the path like a fat hogshead kecked from the tail of a cart, picked himself up and went staggering down the drive, shaking his fist at the house and pouring his maledictions upon it in a voice that was like the broken howl of a limping dog.

Janet came running from her room, and seeing Stowell with his eyes aflame and panting for breath, said,

"Oh dear! Oh dear! Now you'll be worse."

"On the contrary, I'll be better--better in every way," he said.

His resolution was taken. Never would he sit on Bessie's case. Nothing should tempt him to do so.

But Fate had not yet done with him.

V

On the afternoon of the following day Stowell walked for a long hour on the shore, trying to deaden the tumult in his brain in the loud surge of the sea. Returning to Ballamoar he found the Governor's carriage outside the house. Had the Governor come to see him? It was Fenella. She was at tea with Janet in the library.

Although she rose to greet him with all the sunshine of her smile he could see that her face was feverish.

"I've come to the north on three errands," she said.

"So?"

"First to see yourself, of course, and I find that, in spite of doctor's orders, you have already resumed your gypsy habits."

"He _would_ go out, dear," said Janet.

"Next, to deliver a message from the Governor."

"Yes?"

"He has postponed the Court for three days in the hope that you may be able to sit then."

"Ah!"

"My last errand was to see the mother of that poor girl who is to be charged with the murder of her child."

"The mother?"

"Yes, I've just left her. She still says she knows nothing. It's pitiful! A simple, sincere, religious old soul, who has seen trouble of her own apparently. I don't think for a moment she would tell an untruth, yet it is easy to see that in her heart she believes her daughter to be guilty."

"Guilty?"

"Yes, but there's somebody guiltier than the girl--the man."

Stowell was silent; but he felt his face twitching.

"That's why I am so anxious that you should sit on this case if you can, Victor, not leave it to Deemster Taubman. Old Judges often refuse to investigate collateral facts, and so the woman is punished and the man goes free."

"They can't do otherwise, dear. They can't try the man."

"Not if he has been a party to the crime?"

"A party...."

"Yes! I'm satisfied that in this case he is, too."

The girl might be guilty, but she could not have done all she was charged with. It was physically impossible. Somebody must have helped her. And that somebody (the old mother having to be ruled out) must be the man who had it to his interest to save his miserable character by concealing the fact that the girl had given birth to a child at all.

Stowell had as much as he could do to cover his embarrassment. He lowered his voice and said,

"That's a blind alley. I've read the Depositions. I'm sure it is, dear."

"Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't," said Fenella. "I intend to follow it up anyway."

"How?" said Stowell, but rather with his mouth than his voice.

"I'm already on the track of something."

"On the track...."

"Yes. It seems that somebody has been telling the mother that on the night when the girl left home (shut out by her abominable step-father, you know) she went to the house of a Mrs. Quayle, living on the south shore in Ramsey."

Stowell's heart thumped and his lips quivered.

"Mrs. Quayle?"

"Why, that must be the housekeeper at your chambers, dear," said Janet, busy with her teacups.

"You know her? .... But then everybody knows everybody in the Isle of Man," said Fenella.

With a sense of duplicity, Stowell found himself saying, "Well?"

"Well, I'm going to see this Mrs. Quayle on my way home to Government House. She'll be able to tell me how long the girl stayed with her, who took her away, and where she went to."

Stowell dropped his head, feeling that he wanted to escape from the room, and Fenella (indignantly, passionately, vehemently) went on to denounce the guilty man.

"Of course the girl is shielding him. A woman always does that. I should do it myself if I were in the same position. But oh, how I should like to find him out! Even if he has taken no part in the actual crime, how I should like to punish him--to expose him! You must sit on this case--you really must, dear."

When the time came for Fenella to go Janet took her upstairs to look at some new decorations that had been made in the room that was to be her boudoir. Stowell remained in the library, and the sound of Fenella's step on the floor above beat on his stunned brain with the drumming noise of a train in a tunnel.

He had a sense of cowardice which he had never felt before. At one moment he wanted to tell Fenella everything, thinking that would be the end of his tortures. But at the next he reflected that it would be the beginning of hers--inflicting an incurable wound upon her affection. And then if Bessie were going to be acquitted, as seemed possible (the evidence being so unconvincing), why should he enlarge the area of the shameful secret?

When Fenella returned (saying, as she came downstairs, how beautiful her room was and how proud she would be of it) he took her out to the carriage.

"Do you remember," she whispered (she had recovered her gay spirits, the coachman was on the box), "do you remember the first time you saw me off from here?"

He nodded and tried to smile.

"I was too bashful to shake hands and you were too shy to look at me."

And being seated in the carriage and the door closed on her, she said,

"By the way, wouldn't you like to drive over with me to Mrs. Quayle if I brought you home again?"

"No, no .... I mean...."

She laughed merrily. "Oh, very well! You've refused me again! I'll remember it, Sir."

After the carriage had disappeared at the turn of the drive, Stowell went up to his room, shut the door behind him and covered his face in his hands.

Fenella hunting him down! Blindly, unconsciously, innocently, while urging him, entreating him, almost compelling him to sit on the case. The woman he loved and who loved him was trying to destroy him. Was this to be his punishment?

Mrs. Quayle? No, she would say nothing. If she thought it would injure his mother's son no power on earth would prevail upon her to speak. But sooner or later, by one means or other, Fenella would find out, and then....

"God be merciful to me, a sinner!" he moaned, smothering the sound of the words behind his hands.

Could he sit in judgment on Bessie Collister's case with all the forces of the defence (inspired by Fenella) directed towards branding the Judge as the real criminal? Impossible! Yet what could he do?

At length an idea occurred to him. He would go up to Government House, tell the whole truth to the Governor and ask to be relieved of his duty. It would be a terrible ordeal, but there was no escape from it.

"Yes, I will go up to the Governor in the morning."