FIRST BOOK THE SIN (continued 3)

While doing so she heard her step-father's voice in the kitchen below, loud as usual and as full of protest, but she had a matter of more moment to think of now—what to wear out of her scanty wardrobe.

The question was easily decided. After putting on white rubber shoes and white stockings, she drew aside a sheet on the wall that ran on a string and took down a white woollen skirt and a new cream-coloured blouse cut low at the neck like Susie's.

But the anchor of her hope was her hat, which she was to wear for the first time, having bought it the day before in Ramsey. It was shaped like a shell, with a round lip in front, and to find the proper angle for it on her head was a perplexing problem. So she stood long and twisted about before an unframed sheet of silvered glass which hung by a nail on the wall, with a lash comb in her hand, a number of hat-pins across her mouth, while the floor creaked under her, and the conversation went on below.

She got it right at last, just tilted a little aside, to look pert and saucy, with her black hair, which was long and wavy, creeping up to it like a cushion. And then, standing off from her glass to look at it again over her shoulder, with eyes that danced with delight, she turned to the door and walked with a buoyant step downstairs.

III

Dan Baldromma also had made an engagement for that day, handbills having been distributed in Ramsey during the morning saying that "Mr. Daniel Collister of Baldromma" would deliver an address in the market-place at seven o'clock in the evening.

At five Dan had strapped down the lever which stopped the flow of water on to his overshot wheel and stepped into the dwelling-house, where Liza, his wife, had laid tea for two and was blowing up a fire of dry gorse to boil the kettle.

"Tell your girl to put a lil rub on my Sunday boots," he said.

"But she's upstairs dressing for Douglas," said Mrs. Collister.

"You don't say?" said Dan. "So that's the way she's earning her living?"

"Chut, man," said Mrs. Collister. "If a girl's in life she wants aisement sometimes, doesn't she? And her ragging and tearing to keep the farm going, and a big wash coming on next week, too."

"Well, that's good! That's rich! I thought it was myself that was keeping the farm going. Douglas, you say? Well, well! I wonder at you, encouraging your girl to go to such places, and you a bound Methodist. Tell her to put a rub on my boots, ma'am."

"I'll do it myself, Dan," said Mrs. Collister. "It's little enough time the girl will have to catch the train, and her fixing on her new hat, too."

"New hat, eh?"

"Aw, yes, man, the one she bought at Miss Corkill's yesterday."

"What a woman! And you telling me, when you got five goolden sovereigns out of me on Monday that she was for wearing it at the Sulby Anniversary. I wonder you are not afraid for your quarterly ticket."

"But it was only the girl's half year's wages, and the labourer is worthy of his hire. Thou art always saying so at the Cross anyway."

"Hould thy tongue, woman, and don't be milking that ould cow any more—it's dry, I tell thee."

It was at this moment that Bessie came downstairs, and Dan, who was on the three-legged stool before the fire, making wry faces as he dragged off his mill-boots with a boot-jack, fell on her at first with his favourite weapon, irony.

"Aw, the smart you are in your new hat, girl—smart tremenjous!"

"I didn't think you'd have the taste to like it," said Bessie, sitting at the table.

"Taste, is it?" said Dan. "Aw, the grand we are! The pride that's in some ones is extraordinary though. There'll be no holding you! You'll be going up and up! Your mother has always been used of a poor man's house and the wind above the thatch. But you'll be wanting feather beds and marble halls, I'm thinking."

"They won't be yours to find then, so you needn't worry," said Bessie.

"You think not? I'm not so sure of that. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards .... So you're for Douglas, are you?"

"Yes, I am, if you'll let me take my tea in time for the train."

"Aisy, bogh, aisy!" said Mrs. Collister.

"Well, you're your own woman now, so I suppose you've got lave to go," said Dan.

And then rising to his stockinged feet, his face hard and all his irony gone, he added, "But I'm my own man, too, and this is my own house, I'm thinking, and if you're not home for eleven o'clock to-night, my door will be shut on you."

Bessie leapt up from the table.

"Shut your door if you like. There'll be lots of ones to open theirs," she cried, and swept out of the house.

"There you are, woman!" said Dan. "What did I say? Imperent uncommon and dirty with the tongue! She'll have to clane it this time though. If she's not back for eleven she'll take the road and no more two words about it."

Mrs. Collister struggled to her feet and followed Bessie, pretending she had forgotten something.

"Bessie! Bessie!"

Bessie stopped at the end of the "street" and her mother hobbled up to her.

"Be home for eleven, bogh," she whispered. "It's freckened mortal I am that himself has some bad schame on."

"What schame?" asked Bessie.

"I don't know what, but something, so give him no chance."

"What do I care about his chance?"

"Aw, bolla veen, bolla veen, haven't I enough to bear with thy father and thee? Catch the ten train back—promise me, promise me."

"Very well, I promise," said Bessie, and at the next moment she was gone.

Five minutes later, arm-in-arm with Susie, she was swinging down the road to the railway station for Douglas.

The little gay town, when they reached it, was at full tide, with pianos banging in the open-windowed houses, guitars twanging in the streets, and lines of young men marching along the pavements and singing in chorus. The girls, fresh from their twinkling village by the lonely hills, with the river burrowing under the darkness of the bridge, were almost dizzy with the sights and sounds.

When they came skipping down the steep streets to the front, and plunged into the electric light which illuminated the bay, they could scarcely restrain themselves from running. And when, bubbling with the animal life which had been suppressed, famished and starved in them, they passed through the turn-stile to the dancing-palace and hurried down the tunnel of trees, lit by coloured lamps, and saw the stream of white light which came from the open door, and heard the crash of the band and the drumming of the dancers within, their feet were scarcely touching the ground and they felt as if they wanted to fly. And when at last, having entered the hall, the whole blazing scene burst on them in a blinding flash, they drew up with a breathless gasp.

"Oh! Oh!"

One moment they stood by the door with blinking and sparkling eyes, their linked arms quivering in close grip. Then Bessie, who was the first to recover from the intoxicating shock, looked up and around, and saw Stowell and Gell sitting in the gallery.

"Good sakes alive," she whispered, "they're there!"

"Who? The gentlemen?"

"Yes, in the front row. Be quiet, girl. They see us. Don't look up. They might come down."

And then the girls laughed with glee at their conscious make-believe, and their arms quivered again to the rush of their warm blood.

IV

"Alick, isn't that our young friend of the glen?"

"Bessie Collister? Where?"

"Down there, standing with the fair girl, just inside the door."

"Well, yes, upon my word, I think it is!"

"I've a great mind to go down to them. Let us go."

"No? Really? In a place like this?"

"Why not, man?"

"Well, if you don't mind, I don't."

A few minutes later, in an interval between the dances, Victor, coming behind Bessie, touched her on the shoulder.

"How are those sweet-smelling heifers——still grazing on the mountains?"

Bessie, who had watched the young men coming downstairs, and felt them at her back, turned with a look of surprise, then laughed merrily and introduced Susie. For a few nervous moments there were the light nothings which at such times are the only wisdom. Then the violins began to flourish for another dance, and the two couples paired off—Victor with Bessie and Susie with Gell.

Victor took Bessie's hand with a certain delicacy to which she was quite unaccustomed and which flattered her greatly. The dance was a waltz, and she had never waltzed before, so they had to go carefully at first, but when the dance was coming to an end she was swinging to the rhythm of the orchestra as if she had waltzed a hundred times.

In the interval the two couples came together again, and there was much general chatter and laughter. Gell joined freely in both, and if at first he had had any backward thoughts of the promise he had given to his father they were gone by this time.

Another dance began and without changing partners they set off afresh, Stowell taking Bessie's hand with a firmer grasp and Bessie holding to his shoulder with a stronger sense of possession. His nerves were tingling. Turning round and round among women's smiling faces, and with Bessie's smiling face by his side, he had the sense of sweeping his partner along with an energy of physical power he had never felt before.

When the orchestra stopped the second time and they went in search of their companions, they discovered Susie on a seat, panting and perspiring, and Gell fanning her with the brim of his straw hat.

Victor's excitement was becoming feverish. He wanted Bessie to himself, and during the third dance he felt himself dragging her to the opposite side of the hall. She knew what he was doing, and found it enchanting to be carried off by sheer force.

When the dance came to an end Victor put Bessie's moist hand through his arm and walked up and down with her. Her throat was throbbing and her breast rising and falling under her low-cut blouse. They spoke little, but sometimes he turned his head to look at her, and then she turned her eyes to his. He thought her black eyes were looking blacker than ever.

The evening was now at its zenith, and the orchestra was tuning up for the "shadow-dance." The white lights on the walls went out, and over the arc lamps in the glass roof a number of coloured disks were passed, to throw shadows over the dancers, as of the sunrise, the sunset, the moon and the night with its stars. The dance itself was of a nondescript kind in which at intervals, the man, with a whoop, lifted his partner off her feet and swung her round him in his arms—a sort of symbol of marriage by capture.

When the shadow-dance ended there was much hand-clapping among the dancers. It had to be repeated, this time with a more rapid movement and to the accompaniment of a song, which, being sung by the men in chorus, made the hall throb like the inside of a drum. Many of the dancers fell out exhausted, but Victor and Bessie kept up to the last.

Then the big side doors were thrown open, and amid a babel of noise, cries and laughter, nearly all the dancers trooped out of the hall into the garden to cool. Victor gave his arm to Bessie and they went out also.

Lights gleamed here and there in the darkness of the trees, throwing shadows full of mystery and charm. After a while the orchestra within was heard beginning again, and most of the dancers hastened back to the hall, but Victor said,

"Let us stay out a little longer."

Bessie agreed and for some minutes more they wandered through the garden, in and out of the electric light, with the low murmur of the sea coming to them from the shore and the muffled music from the hall.

She was breathing deeply, and he was feeling a little dizzy. They found themselves talking in whispers, both in the Anglo-Manx, and then laughing nervously.

"Did you raelly, raelly see the young colts racing on the tops, though?"

"'Deed no, not I, woman. But I belave in my heart I know who did."

"Who?"

"Why you!"

At that word, and the touch of his hand about her waist, she made a nervous laugh, and turned to him, her eyes closed, her lips parted and her white teeth showing, and they drew together in a long kiss.

At the next moment a clock struck coldly through the still air from the tower of a neighboring church and Bessie broke away.

"Gracious me, that must be ten o'clock. I have to catch the ten train home."

"You can't now. It's impossible," he said, and he tried to hold her.

"I must—I promised," she cried, and she bounded off. He called and followed a few steps, but she was gone.

Feeling like a torn wound he returned to the dancing-hall. The scene was the same as before but it seemed crude and tame and even dead to him now. Where was Gell? He must have gone to see the fair girl off by the ten train. He would come back presently.

Victor returned to the hotel. To compose his nerves while he waited he called for another half bottle of wine, and drank it, iced. The music was still murmuring in his ears. After a while it stopped; there were a few bars of the National Anthem, and then the pattering like rain of innumerable feet on the paved way from the dancing-hall to the promenade. It was now a few minutes to eleven, and remembering that that was the hour of the last train to the north he walked up to the station.

A noisy throng was on the platform, chiefly young Manx farming people of both sexes, returning to their homes in the country. The open third-class carriages were full of them, all talking and laughing together.

Victor walked down the line of the train and looked into each of the dim-lit carriages for Bessie, thinking it impossible that she could have caught the earlier one. Not finding her, he inquired if the ten train had left promptly and was told it had been half-an-hour late. She must have gone.

He got into an empty first-class compartment, folded his arms and closed his eyes and the train started. While it ran into the dark country the farming people, being unable to talk with comfort, sang. Over the rolling of the wheels their singing came in a dull roar, and when the train stopped at the wayside stations it went up in the sudden silence in a wild discord of male and female voices.

Victor was beginning to feel cold. He put up the window. His brain which had been blurred was becoming lucid. He recalled the scenes he had taken part in and some of them seemed to him now to have been crude and common and even a little vulgar. He thought of Bessie and felt ashamed.

When the train drew up at the station for the glen he turned his face from the direction of the mill, and to defeat a desire to look at it he opened the window at the other side of the carriage and put out his head.

The free air was refreshing to body and brain, but when his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness he saw the broad belt of the trees of Ballamoar. That brought a stabbing memory of Janet and the promise he had given her, and then of the Deemster and his conversation with the Governor.

He began to shiver, and to feel as if he were awakening from a fit of moral intoxication. To-morrow he would go home, and since he could not trust himself any longer, he would put himself out of the reach of temptation by living at Ballamoar in future.

When the train drew up at Ramsey it was half-past twelve. As he walked out of the quiet station into the echoing streets of the sleeping town he was drawing a deep breath and saying to himself:

"Thank God!"

It was all over.

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.

"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.

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