Chapter FORTY-TWO: "he Drove Out the Man"

"Sorry to trouble you at this hour, your Honour, but I had to come and tell you what has happened."

"What is it, Joshua?"

"There has been a fearful outbreak of lawlessness in Douglas this evening--breaking of shop-windows, looting of the houses of well-to-do people, assaults and outrages of all kinds."

"What is the reason of it?"

"Mob reason, and you know what that is, your Honour. They say justice in the island is corrupt. If you are rich you get whatever you want. If you are poor you get nothing. A guilty man and a guilty woman have been allowed to escape. Why? Because the man belongs to a family of 'the big ones' and is a friend of the Deemster."

"Who say that?"

"Old Qualtrough and Dan Baldromma."

"Baldromma? If his step-daughter has escaped what has he to complain of?"

"Nothing, but that's not the worst, Sir."

"What is?"

"The Governor has telegraphed for soldiers from across the water. They are to come over by the first boat in the morning. It's a frightful blunder, Sir."

Beads of perspiration were rolling down from Joshua's bald crown.

"There'll be bloodshed, and Manxmen won't stand for that. They've been their own masters for a thousand years. The Governor can't treat them as if they were Indian coolies."

"What do you think ought to be done?"

"That's what I've come to say, Sir. I had gone to bed but I couldn't take rest, so I got Willie Dawson to drive me over. The people may be wrong about justice, but the only way to pacify them is to prove it."

"How?"

"The guilty man in this case must give himself up."

"Give himself up?"

Joshua took off his coloured spectacles and wiped the damp off them.

"I thought your Honour might know where he was. He can't be far away, Sir."

"Well?"

"He ought to be told to deliver himself up to the Courts to save the island from ruin. And if he won't he ought to be denounced."

"Denounced?"

"It will be a terrible ordeal--I know that, Sir. Your friend! Your life-long friend! Pity! Great pity!"

For a perceptible time Stowell did not speak. Then, in a voice which Joshua had never heard before, he said,

"Go home and go to bed, Joshua. I'll see what can be done."

Joshua had gone, the door had closed behind him and his wheels were dying away down the drive, but Stowell continued to stand in the hall, candle in hand and stiff as a statue. At length he returned to the dining-room, put the candle on the table and sat before the empty hearth.

It was all over! The plan he had made for himself was impossible. There could be no resigning in secret and stealing away from the island.

He had done harm to something. He had done harm to Justice. If Justice fell down what stood up? The man who took the law into his own hands was a criminal, and as a criminal he ought to be punished.

Punished? The shock was terrible. Was he then to give himself up? To confess publicly?

He saw himself pleading guilty to having broken prison. He heard the whole wretched tale of his relation to the unhappy prisoner, and of his trying and condemning her, coming out in open Court. He heard the howls of execration from the people who had hitherto loved and cheered him.

"Is there no other way?" he asked himself.

He saw himself in prison, in prison clothes, in the prison cell, on the prison bed. Above all he saw another Deemster going upstairs to sit on the bench while he lay in the vaults below.

He thought of his father and his family--four hundred years of the Ballamoars and not a stain on the name of one of them until now. He thought of Fenella--the cruel shame he would bring on her. Granted he was guilty, and deserved punishment, had he any right to punish Fenella also?

The clock on the landing struck one. An owl shrieked in the plantation. He got up and strode about the room. The impulses of the natural man began to fight for safety.

"Good God, what am I thinking about?" he asked himself.

What had he done to deserve all this? He had broken a wicked law which had no right to exist, but did that require that he should denounce himself, go to prison, degrade his father's name, break Fenella's heart and put himself up on a gibbet for every passer-by to jeer at and spit upon?

"What madness! What rank madness!"

He thought of the thousands of "great" men in all ages of the world who had broken bad laws, and yet lived in honour and died in glory. Why should he suffer for doing the same thing? Why he and not the others? He laughed in scorn of his own weakness, but at the next moment a mocking voice within him seemed to say,

"Go on! Go on! Issue that warrant! Let the unhappy girl who trusted you be brought back and executed. Let the friend who loved you be arrested and tried and sent to jail for the crime you have committed. Go through all that duplicity again. Let the whole community be submerged in anarchy as the consequence of your sin. But remember, when you come out of it all, you will be a devil, and your soul will be damned."

That terrified him and he sat down by the empty hearth once more. After a while he found his hands wet under his face. He heard a soft, caressing voice pleading with him,

"Victor, my darling heart! Resist this great temptation and peace will come to you. Do the right, and no matter how low you may fall in the eyes of men, you will look upon the face of God."

It was Fenella's voice--he was sure of that. Across the mountain and through the darkness of the night her pure soul was speaking to him.

The candle had burnt to the socket by this time, but a new light came to him. For more than a year he had been a slave, dragging a chain of sin behind him. At every step in his wrong-doing his chain had lengthened. He must break it and be free.

"Yes, I will go up to Government House in the morning," he thought, "confess everything and take my punishment."

It was only right, only just. And when the cruel thought came that the next time he entered the court-house it would be to stand in the dock, with the dread certainty of his doom, he told himself that that would be right too--the Judge also must be judged.

II

Groping his way upstairs in the darkness he entered his bedroom and locked the door behind him. He found a fire burning, the sofa drawn up in front of it, a lamp burning on the bureau that stood at one side, and at the other the high-backed arm-chair in which his father used to undress for bed. He was surprised to see that the fire had been newly made up, but hearing footsteps in the adjoining bedroom he understood.

"Poor Janet!" he thought.

His thoughts were thundering through his brain like waves in a deep cavern. He was convinced that he would never survive the ordeal that was before him. When men lived through long imprisonments it was because they had hope that the beautiful days would come again. He had no such hope, so, sitting at his bureau, he began to sort and arrange his papers like one who was going away on a long journey.

After that he wrote a letter to the Attorney-General:

"DEAR MASTER,--When this letter comes to your hand you will know
the occasion for it. I am aware that it cannot have the
authority of a will, but (in the absence of a more regular
document) I trust the Clerk of the Rolls may find a way to act
upon it as an expression of my last wishes.

"I desire that Janet Curphey should be suitably provided for as
long as she lives. She has been a mother to me all my life, the
only mother I have ever known.

"I desire that Mrs. Collister of Baldromma may have such a
provision made for her as will liberate her from the tyrannies of
her husband.

"I desire that Thomas Vondy, formerly the jailer at Castle
Rushen, should be taken care of in any way you may consider best.

"Finally, if I do not live to return home, I desire that
everything else of which I die possessed should be offered to
Fenella Stanley as a mark of my deep love and devotion.

"I think that is all."

Having signed, sealed and inscribed his letter he put it in his breast pocket. Then taking a drawer out of the bureau he carried it to the sofa, intending to destroy the contents of it.

The first thing that came to his hand was the letter which Alick Gell had given him at Derby Haven. It was marked "To be opened after we have gone," and turned out to be a memorandum to his father's executors, telling them he was leaving the island with no intention of returning to it, and asking (as his only request) that in the event of an inheritance becoming due to him, seven hundred pounds, which had been advanced to him at various times, should be repaid to Deemster Victor Stowell--"the best friend man ever had."

Feeling a certain twinge, Stowell hesitated for a moment, with the memorandum shaking in his hand, and then threw it into the fire.

There were other papers of the same kind (I O U's and the like) which shared the same fate, and then up from the bottom of the drawer, came a leather-bound book. It was "Isobel's Diary." He had decided to destroy that also. As the sanctuary of his father's soul he could not allow it to be looked into by other eyes.

But, never having looked at it himself since the night of his father's death, he could not resist the temptation to glance through it once more before committing it to the flames. It fell open at the page which said,

"So it's all well at last, Isobel. Your son can do without me
now. He needs his father no longer. With that brave woman by
his side he will go up and up. They will marry and carry on the
traditions of the Ballamoars. It is the dearest wish of my heart
that they should do so."

His throat throbbed. Ah, those hopes, all wrecked and dead! Going down on one knee before the fire, and holding the book on the other, he tore out page by page and burnt it, feeling as if he were burning his right hand also. He was afraid of tears and had rarely given way to them, but he was weeping like a heart-broken woman before the last page had been consumed.

Then, taking Fenella's letters from his pocket-book, he prepared to burn them too. They brought a faint perfume, a feeling of warmth, a sense of her physical presence. Most of them were notes of no consequence--appointments to ride, drive, fish, skate, all touched by her gay raillery ("eight o'clock in the morning--is that too early for you, Victor, dear?")--he had preserved every scrap in her hand-writing. But one was the letter she wrote to him when he was in London, and with palpitating tenderness he held it under the lamp to read it again:

"Victor, when I think of the life that is so surely before you,
and that I shall walk through it by your side, perfectly united
with you, sharing the same hopes and aims and desires, enjoying
the same sunshine and weathering the same storms, I have a vision
of happiness that makes me cry with joy."

His heart swelled like a troubled sea, and to conquer his emotion he thrust the letter hurriedly into the flames. But before it was more than scorched he snatched it back and was preparing to return it to his pocket when he bethought himself how soon it must pass into other hands with everything he carried about him. And then, turning his head away, and feeling as if he were burning his heart also, he put it into the fire.

After that he dropped back on to the sofa with feelings about Fenella that found no relief in tears. One by one the joyous hours of their love returned to his memory. They seemed to ring in his ears with the melancholy sound of far-off bells. It was a cruel pleasure.

All at once came a moment of fierce rebellion. When he had told himself downstairs that in making the great renunciation of his public office he must renounce Fenella also he had not realised what it meant. It meant that never again, for as long as he lived (Fenella being impossible to him), would Woman take any part in his existence.

A cold fear took possession of him at that thought. He was a man--was he for the rest of his life, if he survived his imprisonment, to be cut off from his kind, separated, alone?

Better be dead than live such a life!

Then another and still more startling thought came to him--why not? A letter to the Governor, exonerating Gell, and then it would all be over. No warrant! No trial! Why not?

Outside the night was dark. Not a breath of wind was stirring. In the silence of earth and sky he could hear the "swish, swish" of the sea on the shingle at the top of the shore. It must be high water.

"Why not? Why not?"

His head was dizzy. He was thinking of a boat that lay among the lush grass on the sandy bank above the beach. Alick and he had often gone fishing in her. She was heavy, but he was strong--he could push her into the water.

He saw himself pulling out to sea, far out, beyond the Point, to where the Gulf Stream in its long race round half the world swept by the island to the coast of Iceland. And then, as the dawn broke in the eastern heavens, he saw himself scuttling the boat and going down with her.

No one would know. The boat would lie at the bottom of the sea until she fell to pieces, and he--he would go north on the way of the great waters until he came to the feet of the frozen Jokulls, where nobody would be able to say who he was or where he came from.

No scandal! No outcry! No vulgar sensation! Just a pang to Fenella, and then the darkness of death over all.

Thinking the lamp was burning low he was reaching out his hand to turn up the wick when a sense came of somebody being in the room with him. He looked round. All was silent.

"Is anybody there?" he asked aloud.

There was no answer. The dread of miscarrying for ever if he died by his own act began to struggle on the battle field of his soul with the fear of being cut off from the living who live in God's peace. He shivered and was trying to rise when again he had the sense of somebody else in the bedroom.

"Who is it?"

At the next moment, raising his eyes, he thought he saw his father in the arm-chair where he had seen him so often. The august face was the same as when he saw it last in that room, except that the melancholy eyes were now open.

"I'm ill," he thought, and he closed his eyes and put his hand over them.

But when he opened his eyes again his father was still there, looking at him with tenderness and compassion. His brain reeled and he fell face down on the cushions of the sofa.

Then he heard his father speaking to him, gently, affectionately, but firmly, just as he used to do when he was alive.

"My son! My dear son! I know what you are thinking of doing, and I warn you not to do it. No man can run away from the consequences of his sins. If he flies from them in this life he must meet them in the life hereafter, and then it will be a hundred-fold more terrible to be swept from the face of the living God."

"Father!"

Stowell tried to cry aloud but could not. His father's voice ceased and at the next moment a vision flashed before him. A line of miserable-looking men were standing before an awful tribunal. He knew who they were--the unjust judges of the world who had corrupted justice. All the grandeur in which they had clothed themselves on earth was gone, and they were there in the nakedness of their shame crying,

"Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!"

Stowell felt as if he were falling off the world into a void of unfathomable night. Then blindness fell upon the eyes of his mind and he knew no more.