Chapter FORTY-SEVEN: The Resurrection

Three days later, Fenella set out for Bishop's Court in a two-horse landau.

The island had begun to recover from its fit of moral intoxication. Sympathy was swinging round to Stowell. The pathos of his stupendous downfall had taken hold of the people. Taubman had been wrong. Nobody would have known anything of Stowell's guilt if he had not revealed it himself. There must be something great in a man who could take up his cross like that. And as for that wonderful woman who might be living in Government House but was living in Castle Rushen instead....

As Fenella, in her nurse's costume, drove through the town some of the women curtsied to her, and most of the men raised their hats. She returned the salutations of none.

"So that's how they expect to wipe out what they did to Victor! Not if I know it though!"

Two hours afterwards she was at the Bishop's palace--a somewhat palatial place, partly old, partly new, sleeping in the shelter of big trees and surrounded by a blaze of rhododendrons.

The Bishop, in his dapper black clothes, received her in a room in the old part of the house. It had been the study of the most famous of his predecessors, the fanatic and saint who had ordered that Kate Kinrade, for the saving of her soul, should be dragged at the tail of a boat. Souvenirs of the dead Bishop were on the walls and tables--his portrait, his Bible, his short crozier, his tasselled staff, and his horn-rimmed spectacles.

The living Bishop was suave and voluble. He congratulated Fenella on looking so well after so much trouble.

"Such a calamity! I might almost say such a tragedy! How the island will miss him!"

He agreed with the Attorney-General. Stowell's act had been one of renunciation. When a man had sinned against God, and violated the world's law, he set a great example by submitting to authority.

"God forbid that I should excuse his crime, but already his renunciation is having a good effect throughout the island. The rioting is over. The soldiers are being sent back, and as for the agitators nobody listens to them any longer. Only this morning the man Baldromma...."

Fenella, who had been beating her foot impatiently on the carpet, at length broke into her own business.

"Bishop, you have heard that I have gone to the Castle as female warder?"

"Yes, indeed. It's so nice of you to stay by the poor man's side while he is in prison, to see that his bodily comforts are being cared for."

"But more than that will have to be done for him if his soul is to be kept alive," said Fenella.

"Really? If you think there is anything _I_ can do...."

"There is, Sir .... You know that I was to have married Mr. Stowell?"

"Indeed I do. Wasn't the marriage to have taken place before very long in our chapel at Bishop's Court?"

"Well, I want it to take place now. Only it must be in the Chapel at Castle Rushen instead."

"You mean .... the prison Chapel?"

"Yes."

For a moment the Bishop was speechless. Then recovering from his astonishment, he rose and stepped to the hearthrug, and standing with his back to the fire, he said, as if addressing an assembly,

"Beautiful and noble, dear lady! To be ready to become the wife of the fallen man just when the whole world is hissing at him in chorus, to inspire him day by day with the hope of a great resurrection, of taking up manful work anew, of regaining all he has lost and more--yes, it is beautiful and noble."

"Then you will be willing to marry us, Sir?" said Fenella.

The Bishop hesitated, and then asked Fenella what view the Governor took of her intention.

"He disapproves of it altogether, and says no clergyman in the island can marry us without incurring his displeasure."

"Ah!"

"But I have always understood that the Bishop is a baron in his own right and therefore independent of the Governor."

"True! That's true! Still...."

The river of rhetoric had suddenly stopped.

"Well?"

"Mr. Stowell is a prisoner. Why marry when you can't live together? Why not wait until he is at liberty?"

"Because he may be dead of despair before the time for that comes," said Fenella, "and the resurrection you speak of may never take place. His heart is breaking. He wants something to live for now. He wants me."

Her eyes had filled and the Bishop had to turn his own away. At length he said, stammering painfully, that he was sorry, very sorry, but having to live at peace with the Governor....

Fenella leapt to her feet.

"Bishop," she said, "the chaplain at Castletown is a poor man with five young children and his living is in the gift of the Governor. But if I can find any other clergyman who is willing to perform the ceremony, will you permit him to do so?"

"Ye--s .... that is to say, if you tell him what you have told me, and he is prepared to take the risk."

Within two minutes more Fenella was back in her landau, driving towards Ballamoar across the Curragh roads, with their warm and rooty odour of the bog.

Janet came running out of the house to meet her, and in a flash they were crying in each other's arms. But, to Fenella's surprise, there was a look of joy in Janet's face, and on stepping into the house she found an explanation. An army of maidservants were in every room, with an arsenal of brushes and mops and pails.

"Why, Janet, what are you doing?"

"Getting ready for my boy coming back, that's what I'm doing."

"But, dear heart, don't you know...."

"Certainly I know. But do you think they can keep a Ballamoar in yonder place long? 'Deed they can't. He'll be coming out soon, and then those dirts of Manx ones who have been making such a mouth will be the first to run to meet him."

It would have been cruel to gainsay her, therefore Fenella described the object of her journey, told of her father's threat and the Bishop's excuses.

"So now I'm looking for a clergyman who will be brave enough to marry us," she said.

They were in the dining-room, and through the glass door to the piazza they could see, on the edge of the cliffs, a field's space from the church, a lonely house without a tree or a bush about it, looking as if it had been slashed by the rain and winds of a hundred winters. It was the Jurby parsonage--the home of Parson Cowley. Janet pointed to it and said,

"Have you been _there_?"

At that question Fenella remembered a story her father had told her about something splendid that Victor had done, before she returned to the island, to save the drunken parson of Jurby in the eyes of the parishioners. In another minute she was back in her carriage.

"Good-bye, child, and God bless you!" said Janet by the carriage door. "And don't forget to tell my boy that Mother will be lighting the fire in the Deemster's room every night of life for him."

The parsonage looked yet more desolate at a nearer view than at a distance. Sea-fowl were screaming in the sky above it and the earth was quaking from the measured beat of the waves against the cliffs below. A patch of garden in front was rank with long grass, and the salt breath of the sea had encrusted the glass of the windows with a grey scale that was like the mould on a dead face.

The door was opened by a timid, elderly woman, the parson's wife, who was her own servant and looked as if all the pride of life had been crushed out of her.

"Please come in, miss," she said. And when the door had been closed from the inside and she was taking Fenella into the study, she called at the foot of the stairs,

"John, a young lady to see you."

The dingy little room looked like an epitome of the life of the man who lived in it. Everything was faded and worn out--books in torn bindings on bulging shelves against the walls; a threadbare carpet trodden thin by the fender; a handful of earthen fire; an arm-chair upholstered in horsehair and sunk in the seat as if the springs had broken; a table laden with loose papers and sprinkled with shreds of tobacco, which seemed to have fallen from a shaking hand; and behind a mirror, from which half the silvering was worn away, two objects on the mantelpiece--a drinking glass, which had obviously contained a frothy liquor and a photograph in a mourning frame of a young man in sailor's costume with the fell stamp of consumption in his eyes and cheeks.

After a moment there was an unsteady step on the stairs and the parson came into the room, wearing a faded skull cap and a dressing-gown much patched and stained.

Fenella told him her story, as she had told it to the Bishop, and then said,

"So I've come to ask if you dare run the risk of marrying us?"

The old parson, who had been listening intently, seemed eager to reply, but something checked him, and looking across at his wife, who continued to stand timidly by the door, he said,

"What do you say, Sarah?"

The old lady did not reply immediately, and pointing to the photograph on the mantelpiece the parson said,

"If it had been John James's case, eh?"

"Do as you think best, John."

"Then I'll do it! Certainly I'll do it! What do I care what the Governor may do to me? Once a priest always a priest--he can't take _that_ from me anyway."

It was just the chance he had been waiting for. Victor Stowell had done something for him, and before he died he wanted to do something for Victor Stowell.

"I will too! I'll give him a good wife and that's the best thing a man gets in this world anyway. I've been publishing your banns too. Do you know I'd been publishing your banns these three Sunday mornings, Victor Stowell being one of my parishioners?"

Fenella, who was feeling a tightness in the throat, contrived to say,

"Then perhaps you'll drive back with me to Castletown and celebrate the service to-morrow?"

"Why shouldn't I?" said the parson, and off he went upstairs (with a firm step this time) to put on his clerical clothes and pack his surplice in a hand-bag.

While his quick footsteps were shaking the ceiling above them the two women stood together in the study, the young one and the old one, face to face.

"It is very good of you, Mrs. Cowley, to take this risk with your husband," said Fenella.

"But isn't that what we women have all got to do?" said Mrs. Cowley.

And then Fenella, unable to say more, put her arms about the timid old thing, who had submerged her own life in the wrecked life of her husband, and kissed her.

II

Stowell had been four days in prison and his depression had deepened to despair. The sense of being buried alive was crushing. Even when he was taken into the court-yard for exercise, and the white birds sailed through the blue sky, he had the sensation of being in a roofless tomb.

Yet he did not spare himself. He had a right to certain indulgences, but asked for none. They put him into an upstairs room, which had once been the armoury of the Castle, but he said, "Put me in the cell that was occupied by Bessie Collister."

He might have continued to wear his own clothes, but said,

"Give me the same clothes as any other prisoner"--a rough tweed, uncombed and undyed, just as it had come from the back of the sheep.

The silence was terrible. The first night was calm, and the only sound that reached him through the thick walls was the monotonous wash of the waves on the shore, which lay empty and alone under the dark sky.

Next morning he heard the clamour of the gulls, and knew that the boats had come in from their night's fishing and the birds were fighting for the refuse thrown overboard. A little later he heard the deadened sound of hammering at a distance--they were caulking the deck of a new vessel in the shipyard across the bay. The world was going on as usual, yet there he was in a silence like that of the grave.

"Don't people sometimes go mad in a place like this?" he asked the jailer.

On the second night the sea was loud, but over the wailing of the waves he heard a raucous voice outside. It was the voice of Dan Baldromma, who, ranging round the Castle walls like an evil spirit, was calling up his taunting message at every lancet window, not knowing which was the window of Stowell's cell.

"The Spaker is dead the day. That's the way they go, the big ones that rob the people. But there's no pocket in the shroud, Dempster--no pocket in the shroud."

On the morning of the third day Stowell received a letter from London, telling him that His Majesty the King had withdrawn his commission, having no longer any use for his services. This smote him like a blow on the brain. It was an abject degradation, like that of an officer being stripped of his decorations before the eyes of the soldiers who had served under him.

But the worst of his pains were his thoughts about Fenella. Like a man suddenly struck blind he was always living over again the scenes of his past life. Sitting on his bed, with his head in his hands and his eyes tightly closed, all the beautiful moments of their love passed in procession before him, from the moment in the glen when he had picked her up in his quivering arms and carried her across the stream, to that parting in the porch at Government House, after she had promised to marry him, and he had seized her about the waist and fastened his lips to her mouth.

Do what he would, he could not resist the intoxication of these cruel memories. But crueller still were his dreams of the future--the dead dreams of their married love, when she would be wholly his, the beautiful body as well as the beautiful soul. Nothing in the world was to have been so lovely as her bare arms about his neck; nothing so thrilling as the throbbing of her breasts when he told her how much he loved her. But when he opened his eyes and saw the blank walls of his cell about him, he felt as if some devil from hell had been tormenting him.

Was this to be his greatest punishment--that what he had lost in Fenella was to be for ever haunting him? Was he never to be left in peace, now that all hope of her was gone from him for ever?

"Better die," he thought. "A thousand times better."

Several times every day the jailer had been in to talk with him. The prison was nearly full of prisoners now, many of the rioters having been arrested ("Not the ring-leaders, they are always too cunning"), so that his turnkeys and lady warder had as much as they could do to keep things going.

This, through the thick haze of his preoccupied mind, brought back to Stowell's memory a glimpse he had got of a woman in nurse's costume who had flashed past him when he was being hustled through that furnace of wrathful faces at the Castle gate, and he asked who she had been.

"Oh, that .... _that's_ our lady warder," said the jailer.

"Is Mrs. Mylrea better then?"

"No, she's dead. We have another one now, Sir."

"Who is she?"

The jailer hesitated and then said, "Don't you know, your Honour?"

Stowell looked up quickly and a stifling recollection of Fenella's last words ("If you have to go to prison, I will follow you") came surging back on him.

"Is it .... is it .... _she_?" he faltered.

"Yes."

That night, when Stowell's supper was brought to him, he sent it away untouched. But the morning broke fair on his sleepless eyes, for he had made up his mind what to do.

A pale ray of reflected sunshine from the eastern wall of the court-house was on the upper part of his cell, and he could hear the voices of children who were playing on the shore.

He asked for a candle, pen and ink and paper, and sat down to write a letter.

"My DEAR FENELLA,--They have told me what you have done and I
cannot bear to think of it. When it became necessary to do what
I did, I knew I should have to give up all hope of you, and since
doing so I have suffered as few men can ever have suffered
before. But if you remain in this place I shall never know
another hour's sleep by night or rest by day. I shall feel that
in surrendering to Justice I was not really doing a courageous
act, as perhaps I thought, but a cowardly one, because I was
throwing half the burden of my sins on to you, who are innocent
of any of them. That thought would break my heart."

He paused. The sea outside was singing on the shore; the children were laughing at their play.

"Fenella, at this last moment I must tell you something. Ever
since I came to care for you, it has been the dearest wish of my
heart that, God helping me, I should make your life a happy
one--that, whatever happened to me, in a world so full of cloud
and shadow, you should live in the sunshine. And now that you
follow me here, to this prison, this tomb .... it is too much. I
cannot bear it.

"Go home, dear. Good-bye and God bless you! Don't let me regret
the impulse that brought me here. If it was right and true I
must bear my punishment alone. Leave me the comfort of thinking
that at least your outer life goes on as if I had never shattered
it. We have had many happy hours together, but they are over.
Life is for ever closed against me. You can do nothing for me
now. It was sweet and good of you to come to this place, and I
feel as if I could give my heart's blood for one more look into
your dear face, but...."

He had written thus far when the key rattled in the lock of his cell. The door opened and there was a flash of the jailer's lantern. Instinctively, without looking up, Stowell covered his letter in his blotting-paper and busied himself with both for a moment. When he raised his eyes the lantern was on the table, but the jailer was gone and somebody else was standing before him.

It was Fenella. She was in wedding dress, with the veil thrown back, looking more lovely than in the most delirious of his dreams. At first he thought it was a phantom, born of the preoccupation of his tortured brain, and in a hushed whisper, trembling all over and rising from his chair, he said,

"Fenella!"

She, too, was trembling, but she put on a brave air and even a little of her gay raillery.

"Yes, it is Fenella. She has come, as she said she would, you know."

"But _why_ have you come?"

"Why? Don't you know what day this is, Victor? This was to have been our wedding-day. It shall be, too."

"Do you mean it?"

"Look at me. Do you think I have dressed up like this for nothing?"

"But don't you see it is impossible?"

"Impossible? Don't you want me any longer then? You promised to marry me, Sir--are you going to break your promise?"

She was laughing, but trying at the same time not to cry. Stowell's voice grew thick and husky.

"Go home to your father's house, Fenella. That is the only place for you."

"But my father has turned me out, so if you send me away also I shan't have a roof to cover me."

"Is that true?"

She tried to laugh again with her old gaiety.

"Well .... nearly."

"You cannot live in a place like this, Fenella."

"Why not? I have the apartments of a Queen, and what was good enough for her will be good enough for me, surely."

"But you forget--I am a prisoner, and if the Governor objects...."

"He doesn't. He has been told and has raised no objection."

"But there isn't a clergyman in the island who would marry a woman like you to a man like me."

"Oh yes, there's one, and I have brought him with me."

"Who...."

"Somebody you did a beautiful thing for long ago, and who new wants to do something for you--for me, I mean. Come in, Parson Cowley."

Then Stowell saw that the door was open and that Parson Cowley was standing in the darkness beyond it. The old parson came into the cell at Fenella's call, sober as a Judge, but with his face more broken up by emotion than it had ever been by drink, for he had heard everything.

"Parson Cowley," said Stowell, in a hoarse voice, "show her it is impossible."

The old man swallowed something in his throat and answered,

"Nothing seems impossible to love, my son."

"But tell her that no good woman can live all her life with a dishonoured man like me."

Again the old parson cleared his throat.

"I know one who has been doing so for forty years, Sir."

Stowell fell back on his chair and dropped his head over his arms on the table. Parson Cowley, unable to bear more, slipped out of the cell and pulled the door behind him.

Fenella and Stowell were then alone. She knew that her last chance had come. She had to conquer him now or lose him for ever. It was the primitive man against the primitive woman, only their age-long positions were reversed, and with all the battery of her womanhood she meant to win him. Stepping closer she said, in a caressing voice,

"Victor, you won't send me away from you, will you?"

"I shall always love you, Fenella," said Stowell, whose head was still down. "I shall love you as an angel."

"But forgive me, dear, I am only a woman, and I want to be loved as a woman first."

He raised his head and looked at her. Her eyes were glistening, her lips were trembling, never before had she seemed to him so beautiful. Feeling himself weakening he rose and turned away.

"I should never forgive myself, Fenella, if I allowed you to make this sacrifice."

"What sacrifice? Everything I want in the world is within these walls."

"Don't tempt me, Fenella. Go away, I beg of you."

"Victor, I am for you. You are for me. Do you want to rob me of the only man in the world for me?"

His heart was beating fast.

"Go away, I tell you. I cannot trust myself any longer."

But the more he commanded her to go, the more her eyes glistened with a look of triumph.

"If I am to go out of this place, you'll have to carry me out," she said, "just as you carried me across the river in the glen."

He gasped, and then flung out at her in a torrent of words.

"Why do you come like this? Is it only to torture me with the thought of what might have been? Haven't I done enough wrong to you already? If I do this wrong also I shall hate myself. And the end of that will be that I shall come to hate you also. I do hate you. Go away! For God's sake go!"

Fenella, with gleaming eyes, took one step closer.

"Victor," she said, "you love me. You know you do. You have never loved any other woman in the world--never for one single moment."

He looked back at her again. Her arms were stretched out to him; her bosom was heaving; her lips were quivering and apart. He could struggle no longer.

"Fenella!"

"Victor!"

She had conquered. They were clasped in each other's arms.

III

Half-an-hour afterwards they were married in the prison chapel. The little place was naked enough now. No flowers, no flags, no carpets, no cushions. Only the two rows of forms, without backs, and the placards on the whitewashed walls at either side--"FOR MEN" and "FOR WOMEN."

The deal table which served for altar was covered by a kitchen table-cloth, on which nothing stood but a plain brass cross and a couple of lighted candles in kitchen candlesticks.

Parson Cowley, in his surplice, stood in front of it, with his well-thumbed prayer-book in his trembling hands. The two who were being married were kneeling at his feet--the sin-soiled man and the daughter of a line of old Manx Kings, bearing a name that had been written high in English history for five hundred years. The jailer and his wife were standing somewhere in the shadows. There was no sound except that of the parson's quavering voice within and the low rumble of the sea outside.

"_I require and charge you, as ye will answer at the dreadful day
of Judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed,
that if either of you know of any impediment why ye may not be
lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it._"

Stowell made a stifled sound as of protest. Fenella put down her hand and took his hand and held it.

"_Victor Christian, wilt thou have this Woman to thy wedded
wife?_"

There was a sensible pause, and Parson Cowley leaned down to Stowell and whispered,

"Say 'I will,' my son."

Then came a slow, half-smothered murmur,

"I .... will."

"_Fenella Charlotte de la Tremouille, wilt thou have this Man to
thy wedded husband?_"

In a clear, unfaltering voice Fenella answered,

"I will."

* * * * * * *

It was all over. The parson and the jailer and his wife were gone. Stowell and Fenella were alone together in the prison chapel, locked in a passionate embrace. The kitchen candles were burning out, but the little dark place shone with glory. The air was stirred as with the presence of angels and lit as by a celestial torch.

In their immense happiness every trouble of life seemed to be gone. Two years? It would be like two months, two weeks, two days--it would be like a walk in the sunshine.

"We must hold together now, dear."

"Yes, until death parts us."

Their hearts swelled with gratitude. Love had taken the sting out of suffering--Love, the saviour, the redeemer. A great hymn of thanksgiving was going up from body and from soul.

They talked of the future.

"Will you leave the island when your time comes, dear?"

"Indeed no, never."

Where his sin had been there also should be his expiation.

"How great! How glorious!"

She cried a little, being so happy, and he had to comfort her. Oh, mystery of the heart of woman! They had changed places again, and now it was she who was the weak one--or pretended to be so--just to make him feel how strong he was, being the man, and that she would have to look up to him all her life to guide and protect her.

"Will you love me always, Victor?"

"Always? As sure as God...."

"Hush! I know you will, dearest. But being only a woman I shall want you to tell me so every night and every morning."

He warned her of the struggles they would have to go through yet, even when the time came to leave that place and return to the world--of the many who would look askance at them for his sin's sake. But she said no, and painted for him a picture of his coming out of prison.

What a scene it would be! His people, his beloved countrymen and countrywomen, who were good at heart, would be at the Castle gates to meet him. There would be thousands and tens of thousands of them to go back with him over the hill to Ballamoar. Carriages, cars, spring-carts, stiff-carts, fishermen in their ganzies and lifeboatmen in their stocking caps--such a procession across the mountains as nobody had ever seen in that island before, his little nation taking him home.

"Oh, I see it all, Victor. When the time comes for you to go through the Castle gates it will be like passing out of death into life, out of the cloud of night into the glory of the sunrise."

He smiled, a melancholy smile, and shook his head.

"I have much to go through yet. You, too, Fenella."

But well she knew that the victory had been won, that the resurrection of his soul bad already begun, that he would rise again on that same soil on which he had so sadly fallen, that shining like a star before his brightening eyes was the vision of a far greater and nobler life than the one that lay in ruins behind him, and that she, she herself, would be always by his side--to "ring the morning bell for him."