FOURTH BOOK THE RETRIBUTION (continued 2)

At length, out of breath and exhausted, she broke into sobs. This quietened her and after a while she asked what had become of her mother.

Fenella, who was alone with her (the woman warder having gone home ill), answered that some good women had carried her mother away and were going to take care of her.

"And where is...."

"Mr. Gell? Upstairs. He sent me down to speak to you."

"I won't speak to anyone. They're all alike. They're only torturing me."

Fenella reproved the girl tenderly. Could she not see that the Deemster himself was trying to help her? He had adjourned the Court to give her another chance, and if she could only explain away the evidence of the scarf....

"I won't explain anything. Why can't you leave me be?"

"You heard what the Deemster said, Bessie? Tell the truth; the whole truth; it will be best for you; best for everybody."

After that Bessie became calmer, and then Fenella (little knowing what she was doing for herself) pleaded with the girl to confess.

"I think I understand," she said. "Sometimes a girl loves a man so much that she cannot deny him anything. Thousands and thousands of women have been like that. Not the worst women either. But the dark hour comes when the man does not marry her—perhaps cannot—and then she tries to cover up everything. And that's your case, isn't it?"

"Don't ask me. I can't tell you," cried Bessie.

Fenella tried again, still more tenderly.

"And sometimes a girl who has done wrong tries to shield somebody else—somebody who is as guilty as herself, perhaps guiltier. Thousands of women have done that too, ever since the world began. They shouldn't, though. A bad man counts on a woman's silence. She should speak out, no matter who may be shamed. And that's what you are going to do, aren't you?"

But still Bessie cried, "I can't! I can't!"

"Don't be afraid," said Fenella. "The Deemster is not like some other judges. He has such pity for a girl in your position that he will do what is right by her whoever the man may be."

"Oh, why do you torture me?" cried Bessie.

"I don't mean to do that," said Fenella. "But a girl has to think of her own position in the long run, and it's only right she should know what it is. If she is charged with a terrible crime, and there is evidence against her which she cannot gainsay, the law has the power to punish her—to inflict the most terrible punishment, perhaps. Have you thought of that, Bessie?"

Bessie shuddered and laid hold of Fenella by both hands.

"On the other hand if she can explain .... if she can say that her child was born dead and that she merely concealed the birth of it, or that she killed it by accident, perhaps, when she was alone and didn't know what she was doing...."

Bessie was breathing rapidly, and Fenella (still unconscious of the fearful game the unseen powers were playing with her) followed up her advantage.

"You can trust the Deemster, Bessie. He will be merciful to a girl who has stood silent in her shame to save the honour of the man she loves—I'm sure he will. And the Jury too, when they see that you did not intend to kill your child, they may .... who knows? .... they may even acquit you altogether."

Bessie was silent now, and Fenella could see, in the half darkness of the cell, that the girl's big pathetic eyes were gazing up at her.

"And then the people who have been thinking hard of you, because you have deceived them, will soften to you when they see that what you did, however wrong it was and even criminal, was done perhaps for somebody you loved better than yourself."

Suddenly Bessie dropped to her knees at Fenella's feet and cried,

"Very well, I will confess. Yes, it's true. I had a child, and I .... I killed it. But I didn't mean to—God knows I didn't."

"Tell me everything," said Fenella. And then, burying her face in Fenella's lap and clinging to her, Bessie told her story, mentioning no names, but concealing and excusing nothing.

Before she had come to an end, Fenella, who had been saying "Yes" and "Yes," and asking short and eager questions (the two women speaking in whispers as if afraid that the dark walls would hear), felt herself seized by a great terror.

"Then it was not Mr. Gell who took you into his rooms when your father shut you out?"

"No, no! Would to God it had been!"

"Then who was it?"

"Don't ask me that. I cannot answer you."

"Who was it? Tell me, tell me."

"I can't! I can't!"

"Was it in Ramsey—his chambers?"

"Yes."

"Is he? .... is he anything to me?"

Bessie dropped her head still deeper into Fenella's lap and made no answer.

"Is he?" said Fenella, and in her gathering terror, getting no reply, she lifted Bessie's head and looked searchingly into her face, as if to probe her soul.

At the next moment the dreadful truth had fallen on her. The girl's fellow-sinner, the man she had been hunting down to punish him, to shame him, to expose him to public obloquy, was Victor Stowell himself!

At the first shock of the revelation the woman in Fenella asserted itself—the simple, natural, deceived and outraged woman. This girl had gone before her! This common, uneducated creature of the fields and the farmyard! For one cruel moment she had a vision of Bessie in Stowell's arms. This was the face he had loved! These were the lips he had kissed! And she had thought he had loved her only—never having loved anybody else!

A feeling of disgust came over her. The girl had not even had the excuse of caring for Stowell. She had been thinking merely of a way of escape from the tyrannies of her step-father. Or perhaps an admixture of sheer animal instinct had impelled her. How degrading it all was!

Bessie, who had begun to realise what she had done, tried to take her hand, but Fenella drew back and cried,

"Don't touch me!"

All the thoughts of years about woman as the victim seemed to be burnt up in an instant in the furnace of her outraged feelings. An almost unconquerable impulse came to leave Bessie to her fate. Let her pay the penalty of her crime! Why shouldn't she?

But after a while a great pity for the girl came over her. If she had sinned she had also suffered. If she was there, in prison, it was only because she had been trying in her ignorant way to wipe out her fault.

But she herself .... her hopes gone, her love wasted....

Fenella bursted into a flood of tears. And then Bessie (the two women had changed places now) began to comfort her.

"I'm sorry. I didn't think what I was doing. Don't cry."

At the next moment they were in each other's arms, crying like children—two poor ship-broken women on the everlasting ocean of man's changeless lust.

Bessie was the first to recover. She was full of hope and expectation, and visions of the future. Now that she had confessed everything the Deemster would tell the Jury to let her off, and then Alick would forgive her also.

"He will forgive me, will he not?"

She was like a child again, and Fenella found a cruel relief in humouring her.

"Yes, yes," she answered.

"When I leave this place I'm going to be so good," said Bessie. "I will make him such a happy life. We'll be married immediately—by Bishop's licence, you know—and then leave the Isle of Man and go to America. He often spoke of that, and it will be best .... After all this trouble it will be best, don't you think so?"

"No doubt, no doubt," said Fenella.

At length she remembered that Gell would be waiting for her. She must go to him. When she reached the corridor she paused, wondering what she was to say and how she was to say it. While she stood there she heard sounds from the cell behind her. Bessie was singing.

Meantime Gell had been fighting his own battle. The black thought which had come hurtling down on him at Derby Haven, when he first read the letter which Bessie had left behind her, was torturing him again. It was about Stowell, and to crush it he had to call up the memory of the long line of good and generous things that Stowell had done for him all the way up since he was a boy.

When at last he saw Fenella approaching he searched her face for a ray of hope, but his heart sank at the sight of it.

"Well?"

"She has confessed."

"She had a child?"

"Yes."

"It was born dead?"

"No, she killed it."

"God in heaven!" said Gell, and it seemed to Fenella that at that moment the man's heart had broken.

She knew she ought to say more, but she could not do so—nothing being of consequence except the one terrible fact of the man's betrayal.

"God in heaven!" said Gell again, and he turned to leave her.

"What are you going to do in the morning?"

"I don't know .... yet."

"Where are you going to now?"

"To .... Ballamoar."

Again she knew that she ought to say more, but again she could not.

Gell was making for the gate, and Fenella, bankrupt in heart herself, wanted to comfort him.

"Mr. Gell," she said, "I have been doing you a great injustice. I ask you to forgive me."

With his hand on the bolt he turned his broken face to her.

"That's nothing—nothing now," he said.

And again she heard "God in heaven!" as the gate closed behind him.

II

"Ah, here you are, dear!"

It was Janet who had heard the hum of Stowell's car on the drive and had come hurrying out to meet him.

"You've had a tiring day—I can see that," she said, as she poured out a cup of tea for him. "Ah, these high positions! 'There's nothing to be got without being paid for,' as your father used to say."

To escape from Janet's solicitude and to tire himself out so that he might have a chance of sleeping that night, he walked down to the shore.

A storm was rising. The gulls were flying inland and their white wings were mingling with the black ones of the rooks. The fierce sky to the south, the cold grey of the sea to the north, the bleak church tower on the stark headland, looking like a blinded lighthouse—they suited better with his mood.

Fenella! She must know everything by this time. How was he to meet her eyes in the morning?

Gell! He, too, must know everything now. How every innocent thing he had done to help his friend would look like cunning bribery and cruel treachery!

It was a lie to say that a sin could be concealed. An evil act once done could never be undone; it could never be hidden away. A man might carry his sin out to sea, and bury it in the deepest part of the deep, but some day it would come scouring up before a storm as the broken seaweed came, to lie open and naked on the beach.

The sky darkened and he turned back. On the way home he met Robbie Creer, and they had to shout to each other above the fury of the wind. The farmer had been over to the Nappin (the fields above the Point) and found hidden fissures in the soil three feet deep. They would lose land before morning.

At dinner Janet did her best to make things cheerful. There was the sweet home atmosphere—the wood fire with its odour of resin and gorse, the snow-white table-cloth, the silver candlesticks, all the old-fashioned daintiness. But Stowell was preoccupied and hardly listened to Janet's chattering. So she went early to her room, saying she was sure he wished to be alone—his father always did, during the adjournment of a serious case. His father again! How her devotion to his father drove the iron into his soul!

It was late and the rain had begun to slash the window-panes when he heard the front door bell ringing. After a few moments he heard it ringing again, more loudly and insistently. Nobody answered it. The household must be asleep.

Then came a hurried knocking at the window of the dining-room and a voice, which was like the wind itself become articulate, crying out of the darkness,

"Let me in!"

It was Gell. For the first time in his life Stowell felt a spasm of physical fear. But he remembered something which Gell had said at the door of the railway carriage in Douglas on the day of the trial of the Peel fisherman ("I should have killed the other man"), and that strengthened him. Anything was better than the torture of a hidden sin—anything!

"Go back to the door—I'll open it," he called through the closed window, and then he walked to the porch.

His heart was beating hard. He thought he knew what was coming. But when Gell entered the house he was not the man Stowell had expected—with flaming eyes and passionate voice—but a poor, broken, irresolute creature. His hair was disordered, his step was weak and shuffling, and he was stretching out his nervous hands on coming into the light as if still walking in the darkness.

"I had to come and tell you. She's guilty. She has confessed," he said.

And then he collapsed into a chair and broke into pitiful moaning. It was too cruel. He could have taken the girl's word against the world, yet she had deceived him.

"Did she say .... who...."

"No."

"No?"

"I didn't ask. Some miserable farm-hand, I suppose—some brute, some animal. Damn him, whoever he is! Damn him! Damn him to the devil and hell!"

Stowell felt a boundless relief, yet a sense of sickening duplicity.

"But what matter about the man?" said Gell. "It's the girl who has deceived me. I daresay I'm not the first either. Perhaps her step-father didn't turn her out for nothing. There may have been something to say for the old scoundrel."

Choking with hypocrisy, Stowell found himself pleading for the girl. Perhaps .... who could say? .... perhaps she had been more sinned against than sinning.

"Then why didn't she tell me?" said Gell. His voice was like a wail.

"Who can say...." (Stowell felt a throb in his throat and was speaking with difficulty), "who can say she wasn't trying to save you pain .... knowing how you believed in her and cared for her?"

"But if she had only told me," said Gell. "If she had only been straight with me!"

Stowell felt himself on the edge of terrible revelations. But he controlled himself. If Bessie had concealed part of the truth what right had he to reveal it? After a moment of silent terror he asked Gell what he meant to do in the morning.

"Advise her to amend her plea and cast herself on the mercy of the Court."

"Yes, that is the only proper course now," said Stowell, and then Gell rose to go.

It was a wild night. The wind was higher than ever by this time and the rain on the windows was rattling like hail. Stowell asked Gell to sleep the night at Ballamoar, secretly hoping he would refuse. He did. He had bespoken a bed at the Railway Inn near to the station—he must go up by the first train in the morning.

Stowell saw him to the door, and held it open with his shoulder against the wind, which swirled through the hall, making the flame of the lamp on the landing to flame up in its funnel. Outside there was the slashing of leaves and the crackling of boughs among the elms around the lawn.

"Well, good-night," said Gell, and turning up the collar of his coat, he went off in the darkness and the rain.

Stowell turned back into the house with a sense of degradation he had never felt before. Oh, what a miserable coward a hidden sin made of a man! Sooner or later it would be revealed and then .... what then?

Suddenly he was startled by a new thought. Bessie's confession would give the trial an entirely different turn. If she pleaded guilty in the morning there would be nothing for the Jury to do. Either they would have to be dismissed or instructed to bring in a formal verdict. The verdict against the prisoner would depend upon the Judges. That is to say, Bessie's fate would depend upon him—upon him alone!

The first shock of this thought was terrible, but after a while he told himself that it came to the same thing in the end. The real responsibility was with the law. A judge was only the law's spokesman. For a given crime a given punishment. A judge did not make the sentence on a prisoner—he had only to pronounce it.

Strengthening himself so, he went to bed. For a long time he lay awake, listening to the many sounds of the storm. In the middle of the night he was startled out of his troubled sleep by a loud crash in the distance.

The morning broke fair, with a clear sky and the sea lying under the sunshine like a sleeping child. But as he drove off, after a scanty breakfast, he found the carriage-drive strewn with young leaves, the torn bough of an old elm stretching across his path, and a number of dead rooks lying about the lawn.

Outside the big gates he met Robbie Creer, who was riding barebacked on a farm horse. The farmer had been over to the Nappin and seen what he had expected. The headland was down; there was a Gob (a mouth) where the Point had been, and the sea was flowing between two cliffs that had been torn asunder.

Driving hard, Stowell arrived early at Castletown and found a crowd at the Castle gate, waiting for the trial as for a show. He was passing through the Deemster's private entrance when he had a vision of a scene which the spectators could not be counting upon. What if the prisoner, while making her confession, accused her Judge?

Joshua Scarff, in his coloured spectacles, was waiting at the door to the Deemster's room.

"I'm afraid your Honour is not well this morning," said Joshua.

"A little headache, that's all," said Stowell.

But he had stumbled on the threshold (a bad omen) and was wondering what would happen before he came out again.

CHAPTER THIRTY THE VERDICT

When the Court resumed Gell rose, with a haggard face, to make an announcement.

In accordance with the suggestion of his Excellency, the accused had been seen during the adjournment (though not by him), with the result that she had confessed to having given birth to a child and being the cause of its death.

"In these circumstances," he said, speaking in a husky voice, "I have taken the only course open to me—that of advising her to revise her plea, and with the permission of the Court she will now do so."

There was a moment of agitation in which the Court was understood to assent, and then Bessie was called upon to plead again. But hardly had she risen at the call of the Deemster when she broke down utterly and sob followed sob at every question that was put to her. At length she bowed her head and that was accepted as her plea of guilty.

Then Gell rose again and said,

"Although the prisoner pleads guilty to causing the death of her child, she says she did not so wilfully. Therefore I propose to put her back in the box to prove extenuating circumstances."

Once more the Court agreed, but when Bessie was removed from the dock to the witness-box she broke down again and not a word could be got out of her.

"It is only natural," said Gell, "that she should feel shame at having to take back what she said yesterday."

The Deemster bowed, and speaking with an obvious effort he appealed to the girl to answer the questions of her advocate. But still Bessie sobbed and made no answer.

"The Court has nothing left to it but to go on to judgment," said the Attorney-General.

At that moment, when the trial seemed to be brought to a standstill, Fenella (sitting near to the witness-box) was seen to lean over and whisper to Gell, who rose and asked to be allowed to make a suggestion—that inasmuch as the accused was unable to answer for herself, somebody else, who knew what she wished to say, should be empowered to answer for her.

The Deemster, seeing what was coming, seemed to catch his breath, but after a moment he agreed. The course proposed, although unusual, was not contrary to the interests of justice or altogether without precedent—a deaf and dumb witness always giving evidence by a speaking proxy. Therefore if the Attorney-General did not object....

"Not at all," said the Attorney.

"In that case," said Gell, "I will ask the lady who received the prisoner's confession to speak on her behalf—Miss Stanley."

It was said afterwards, when the events of that day had a fierce light cast back upon them, that when Fenella stepped up to the witness-box, and stood side by side with the prisoner, ready to take her oath, the Deemster seemed scarcely able to recite the familiar words to her.

"Please tell the Court, as nearly as possible in her own words, what the prisoner told you," said Gell.

There was a deep and concentrated silence. Never before had anybody witnessed so strange a scene. Speaking calmly and firmly, Fenella told Bessie's story as Bessie herself had told it—her journey from the south of the island, the birth and death of her child, and the burying of it under the Clagh-ny-Dooiney.

When she had finished, and Bessie, who was stifling her sobs, had bowed her head in reply to a question from Gell that she assented to what had been said on her behalf, the Attorney-General rose to cross-examine.

"Does the prisoner deny," he said, "that when she returned home she told her mother of her condition?"

"Yes, her mother knew nothing about it."

"Does she deny that by keeping her condition secret from the person most proper to know of it, she deliberately intended to put her child away by violence?"

"No, she does not deny that, but says that when her baby came the instinct of motherhood came too, and from that moment onward the idea of taking its life was far from her heart."

"Does the prisoner wish the Court to believe that—in spite of her subsequent conduct in concealing the birth and death of her child and in secretly burying it?"

"Yes, she does, and if a court of men cannot believe it, a court of women would, because...."

But the Attorney-General, with a look of triumph, sat down quickly, and Fenella, flushing up to her flaming eyes, stopped suddenly.

There was another moment of deep silence in Court, and then Gell, who had to struggle with his emotion, rose to re-examine.

"Does the prisoner say that when she killed her child she did so unconsciously and under the influence of fear?"

"Yes, under the influence of fear—fear of her step-father who had behaved like a brute to her."

"Does she think that, however lamentable her act, she was moved to it by pardonable motives?"

"Not pardonable motives merely," said Fenella, flaming up again, "but nobly unselfish ones."

"Nobly unselfish motives!" said the Attorney-General, rising again. "Will the witness please tell the Court what she means by nobly unselfish motives in a case like this?"

"I mean," said Fenella, hesitating for a moment, looking up at the Deemster and then (before she could be stopped) speaking with passion and rapidly, "I mean that this girl was betrayed at the time of her sorest need by one who should have protected her, not taken advantage of her. I mean that, falling in love afterwards with another man—a good man who was willing to make her his wife—she committed the crime solely and only in an effort to cover up her fault and to save her honour in the eyes of the man who loved her. I mean, too, that the real guilt lies not so much with this poor creature who sits here in her shame, as with the man who used her, caring nothing for her, and then left her to bear the consequences of their sin alone. Shame on him! Shame on him! May no good man own him for a friend! May no good woman take him for a husband! May he live to...."

The irregular outburst was interrupted by a cry from the advocates' benches. Gell had risen with wild eyes. He seemed to be trying to speak. His mouth opened but he said nothing, and after looking first at Fenella and then at the Deemster he sank back to his seat. And then Fenella, as if realising what she had done, sat also.

There were some moments of uneasy silence, and then the Attorney-General rose for the last time.

"It is impossible," he said, "not to be moved by what we have just heard, however improper on legal grounds it may have been. But the Court will not allow themselves to be carried away by their feelings. It is the natural consequence of great crimes that they should bring great suffering. The prisoner has confessed to a great crime. She has failed to establish proof of extenuating circumstances. Therefore, for the protection of human life, as well as the good name of this island, I ask for the utmost penalty of the law."

After that there was a long pause, broken only by some whispering on the bench. It was observed that the Deemster took no part in it, except to bend his head when the Governor and the Clerk of the Rolls leaned across and spoke to him. At length, with a manifest effort, and in a low voice (so low that the people in Court had to lean forward to hear him) he began to address the Jury.

II

"When a prisoner pleads Guilty," he said, "it is usual for the Court to proceed at once to the sentence. But in the present unhappy case it has been thought right that the Judge, in directing the Jury to find a formal verdict, should indicate the grounds on which the Court has based its judgment.

"The prisoner has pleaded guilty to taking the life of her new-born child. She has confessed that down to the hour of its birth she had the deliberate intention of making away with it, and the Court is unhappily compelled to find in her conduct only too many evidences of that design.

"But she has also said that after her child's birth, under the divine love and compassion of awakened motherhood, she repented of her intention of killing it, and that it came to its death by accident—the accident of semi-consciousness and the consequences of her fear. The Court would gladly accept this explanation if it could be corroborated by the evidence. Unfortunately it cannot. On the contrary the prisoner's subsequent behaviour points to an entirely different conclusion. Therefore the Court has nothing before it but the prisoner's confession that she intended to take the life of her child, and the fact that she did indeed take it."

The Deemster paused (Gell had risen and was seen crushing his way out of Court); then he continued,

"How her child came by its death is between God and her conscience. It is not for me, or perhaps for any man, to read the secret of a woman's heart in the dark hour of the birth of her misbegotten child. Into the cloud of that mystery only the eye of Heaven can follow her. But I should fail in my duty as a Judge if I did not try to show that the Court is fully conscious of the physical weaknesses and spiritual temptations which lie in the way of a woman who is in the position of the accused."

Then followed, during some breathless moments, such speaking as nobody present had ever heard before except from Stowell himself, and only from him on the day when he snatched from the gallows the rag of a woman who had killed her husband.

It was a contrast of the conditions attending the birth of a child born in wedlock, and of a child born illegitimate. They all knew the first. The beloved young wife watching with a thrilling heart for the signs of that coming event which was to complete her joy; the happy months in which she is shielded from all harm; the tender solicitude of her husband; her own sweet and secret preparations for the little stranger who is to come; the guesses as to its sex; the discussions as to its name—until at length, in the fulness of its appointed time, the child born in wedlock comes, like an angel floating out of the sunrise, into a world that is waiting for it to take it into its arms.

But the child born out of wedlock—what of that? The poor mother, betrayed perhaps, abandoned perhaps, bereft of the love she counted upon, living for months in fear of every accusing eye, in dread of the being under her heart who is coming to shame her, to drive her from her home, to make her an outcast and a byword among women—until at last she creeps away to hide herself in some secret place, where, alone, in the darkness of night, distraught, amid the groans as of a thunderstorm, she faces death to bring her fatherless babe into a world that wants it not.

"What wonder if sometimes," said the Deemster, "in the pain of her body and the disorder of her soul, a woman (all the more if she has hitherto borne a good character) should be tempted to escape from her threatening disgrace by killing the child who is the innocent cause of it?"

But rightly or wrongly, the law could take no account of such temptations. In the great eye of Justice the issues of life and death were in God's hands only. Life was sacred, and not more sacred was the life that came in the palace, with statesmen waiting in the antechamber, the life of the heir to a throne, than the life that came in the hovel and under the thatch, the life of the bastard who was to run barefoot on the roads.

"It may be thought to be a hard law which takes no account of temptations to which women are exposed when nature demands that penalty from them which it never demands from men. But we who sit here have nothing to do with that. Judges are sworn to administer the law as they find it, whatever their own feelings may be. Therefore the Court has now no choice but to direct the Jury to find a verdict of guilty against the prisoner."

There was a deep drawing of breath in Court, and everybody thought the Deemster had finished, but after another short pause, in a tremulous voice which vibrated through all hearts, he continued,

"But the Jury has a right which the Judges cannot exercise—they can go beyond the law. And if, having heard the evidence in this case, and having God and a good conscience before them, the Jury, in finding their formal verdict, can come to a conclusion favourable to the prisoner's story, they may recommend her to the mercy of the Crown, and thereby lead, perhaps, to the lessening of her punishment, and even to the wiping of it out altogether. If not, the law must take its course, at the discretion of the Governor as the representative of the King."

When the Deemster's tremulous voice had ceased the jurymen put their heads together for a moment. Then one of them rose to ask if they might retire to their own room to consider the point left to them by His Honour.

"The Court agrees," said the Governor, and the jurymen trooped out.

The Judges and the advocates went out also, and the prisoner (who had been clinging to Fenella's hand) was removed. Only die spectators remained in their places. They were afraid to lose them for the concluding scene.

III

In a small unventilated room overlooking the Keep the Jury considered their share of the verdict.

"Gentlemen," said one (he was an auctioneer and a Town Commissioner), "you heard what the Deemster said. We can't let her off but we can recommend her to mercy."

"Why should we?" said another, a tall landowner with a bad reputation about women. "She killed her child. Let her swing, I say."

"But she said she didn't intend to and that she was out of herself and frightened by her step-father," said a third—a fat butcher who was sitting astride on a chair and making it creak under him.

"Chut! That was only an after-thought," said a fourth—a little bald-headed English grocer.

"Still and for all we know what Dan Baldromma is," said the butcher, "an infidel who believes neither in God nor the devil."

"He's devil enough himself," said the grocer. "His father was the 'angman."

"That was his uncle," said the butcher.

"No, but his father. They called him Dan the Black, and after the 'anging of Patrick Kelly of Kentraugh...."

"Question! Question!" cried the Town Commissioner. "Let's keep to the point, gentlemen."

"Let's get finished and away," said the grocer. "I've 'ad an addition to my family, I may tell you. A son at last after four daughters. My wife's getting up to-day and we're to 'ave a turkey for dinner. Let the woman off, I say."

"But we can't, man. Didn't you hear what the Deemster said?"

"Then let the 'uzzy 'ang."

"Are we to recommend the girl to mercy—that's the question," said the Town Commissioner.

"Why shouldn't we?" said the butcher. "Hundreds and tons of girls have done as bad before now, and nobody a penny the wiser. Why make flesh of one and fowl of another?"

"If we show mercy to women of this sort we'll only encourage them in their bad conduct," said the landowner.

This led to a random discussion on the question of Women or Men, which were the worst? The landlord was loud in denunciation of women, the butcher was more indulgent.

"Look here," said the butcher, "this isn't a game a woman can go into a corner and play all by herself, you know. For every bad woman there's a bad man knocking about somewhere."

"A man isn't always filling his house with by-children anyway," said the landowner.

"No," said the butcher, "but he is sometimes filling other people's though."

"That's personal, and I won't stand it," cried the landowner, and then there were loud shouts with much smiting of the table.

In the midst of the tumult a quiet voice was heard to say,

"Hadn't we better lay this matter before the Lord, brothers?"

It was a northside farmer and local preacher, who (not always to his financial advantage) had made it the rule of his life, whether in the reaping of his corn or the sowing of his turnips, to wait for Divine guidance. In another moment he was on his knees, and one by one his fellow-jurymen, including the long landowner, had slithered down after him.

When they rose they were apparently of one opinion—that inasmuch as nobody except God knew why Bessie had killed her child (being alone and under the cloud of night) the only thing to do was to leave her to the Lord.

Meantime Gell, with restless and irregular footsteps, was striding about in the court-yard. Fenella's outburst had fallen on him like a flash of lightning in the darkness. Everything had suddenly become clear—all the vague fears that had haunted him so long, the suspicions he had thrust behind his back, the facts he had been unable to understand. What a blind fool he had been!

Stowell! His life-long friend, on whose word he would have staked his soul! There must have been a conspiracy to deceive him. Both Stowell and Bessie had been in it—Stowell to get rid of the girl he no longer wanted, and Bessie to cover up her disgrace by marrying him. What a plot! The woman he had loved and the man he had worshipped! He saw himself hoodwinked by both of them, lied to, perhaps laughed at. His life, his faith, his love had crashed down in a moment. It was too cruel, too damnable!

The air was chill, though the sun was shining, but Gell took off his wig and carried it in his hand, for his head seemed to be afire.

After a time the hatred he had felt for Bessie became centred, with a hundredfold intensity, upon Stowell. Even if Bessie had begun with an intention of betraying him, she must have repented of it afterwards, and committed her crime, poor girl, because (as Fenella had said) she had come to love him. But Stowell had carried on his deception to the last moment. He was carrying it on now, when he was sitting in judgment on his own victim. He meant to sentence her to death, too. Yes, under all his fine phrases it was easy to see that he meant to sentence her. But if he did so Gell would murder him.

"Yes, by God, I'll murder him," he thought.

In the darkness of her cell, with no light on her tortured face except that of the candle behind the grill, Bessie, breaking into another fit of hysteria, was reproaching Fenella with deceiving her.

"You told me that if I confessed the Deemster would let me off. But he is going to condemn me. Why couldn't you let me be? What for did you come here at all? I didn't ask you, did I?"

"Be calm," said Fenella, "and I will explain everything."

After awhile Bessie regained her composure and then she asked for forgiveness.

"I beg your pardon. Sometimes I don't know what I am saying. It has been like that all through the time of my trouble. It was very wrong to forget how you spoke up for me in Court. You'll forgive me, won't you?"

And then Fenella, though sorely in need of comfort herself, comforted the girl and reassured her. The Court might be compelled to sentence her, as it had sentenced other girls for similar crimes, but the sentence would not be carried out. It never was in these days.

"Besides," she said, "the jury will recommend you to mercy, and then the Judges will exercise their discretionary power to reduce your punishment."

Bessie's eyes began to shine.

"You must really forgive me .... And Alick—do you think Alick will forgive me too?"

"Yes, when he sees that what you did was done out of your love for him."

"How good you are! .... And shall we be able to leave the Isle of Man and go away somewhere?"

"Perhaps .... some day."

"Oh, how good you are! I don't know what I've done for you to be so good to me. I didn't think anybody except a girl's mother could be so good to her."

She was like a child again. Her face, though still wet, was beaming. In the selfishness of her suffering it had not occurred to her before that her comforter had been suffering also, but now, in some vague way, she became aware of it.

"If they ask me who he was," she said, in a whisper (meaning who had been her fellow-sinner), "I'll never tell them—never!"

Fenella's humiliation was abject. "When we go back to Court," she said, "you must be brave, whatever happens."

"Will you let me hold your hand?" said Bessie.

And Fenella, scarcely able to speak, answered,

"Yes."

In the Deemster's room there was a painful silence. The Clerk of the Rolls was under the deeply-recessed window, turning over the crinkling folios of the Depositions in the case to be taken next. The Governor, stretched out in the leathern bound armchair before the empty fireplace, was smoking hard and trying to justify himself to his own conscience. Stowell was sitting at the end of the long table, with his head in his hands, gazing down at the red blotting-pad in front of him.

No one spoke. Occasionally there came from without the mournful cry of the gulls flying over the harbour, and, at one moment, the ululation of a crew of Irish sailors who were weighing anchor on a schooner in the bay.

The profound silence around only made louder the thunder in Stowell's soul. He knew he was at the crisis of his life. On what he did now the future of his life depended.

The address to the Jury had been a fearful ordeal, but the sentence would be terrible. To sentence Bessie Collister, having been the first cause of her crime—could he do it? It might only be a formal sentence (the Crown being certain to commute the punishment), but the awful words prescribed by the Statute—would they not choke in his very throat?

And then Fenella! Her voice was ringing in his ears still:

"Shame on him! Let no good man own him for a friend! Let no good woman take him for a husband!"

"And what will be the end?" he asked himself.

He heard the door open behind him. A low hum of voices came down the staircase from the Court-house. There was a footstep on the carpeted floor. Somebody by his side was speaking. It was Joshua Scarff.

"The Jury are ready to return to Court, your Honour."

IV

When Stowell resumed his seat on the bench, and the buzz of conversation had subsided, he was conscious of the presence of only three persons besides himself—Bessie in the dock with Fenella by her side, and Alick Gell, with distorted face and wig a little awry, in the bench in front of them.

The Jurymen filed back. The Clerk of the Rolls read out their names and then asked for their formal verdict.

"You find the prisoner Guilty, according to the instructions of the Court?"

"Aw, yes, guilty enough, poor soul," said the foreman (it was the northside farmer), "but lave her to the Lord, we say."

There was a titter at this quaint finding, but it was quickly suppressed. Then the Clerk of the Rolls said,

"I assume that means that you recommend her to mercy?"

"Aw, yes, mercy enough too," said the foreman, "for when the sacrets of all hearts are revealed it's mercy we'll all be wanting."

After that Stowell was conscious of a still deeper hush in Court. He saw Bessie, in the full glare of her shame, standing in the dock, holding the rail with one hand and clinging to Fenella with the other.

He heard himself asking her if she had anything to say why judgment should not be pronounced upon her. She made no answer, but there was a strange expression of frightened hope in her face. He understood—she was expecting that he would save her even at the last moment.

At that sight there came to him one of those frightful impulses which tempt people on dizzy heights, from sheer fear of danger, to fling themselves into the abyss below.

"Prisoner at the bar," he said, "it has been said on your behalf that you were first led to do what you did by the act of one who remains unpunished while you have to bear the full weight of your fall. If you think it will lessen the burden of your crime to plead this as an extenuating circumstance speak—it is not too late to do so."

Bessie made no reply, and Stowell, who felt Fenella's eyes fixed on him, continued,

"Don't be afraid. If you think it will lighten your guilt in the eyes of the Court to mention that man's name, mention it."

Bessie swayed a little, as if dizzy, looked round at Fenella, and then turned back to the bench and shook her head.

The hush in Court was broken by a rustle of astonishment. Had the Deemster lost himself? Stowell was conscious of a movement by his side and of the Governor saying, in an angry whisper,

"Go on, for God's sake!"

At length, in a voice so low as to be only just heard even in the breathless silence, he said,

"Elizabeth Corteen, you have pleaded guilty to the charge of taking the life of your innocent child, the little helpless babe who had no other natural protector than the mother who bore it on her bosom. By this act you have brought yourself under the condemnation of the law, and it is for the law to punish you. But out of regard to your sufferings and the uncertainty as to your motives, the Jury have recommended you to mercy, and it will be my duty to see that their prayer is sent, through His Excellency the Governor, to the high and proper authority, in the hope that the measure of pardon which, in all but exceptional cases, is granted to persons in your position, may be extended to you also."

The tears were rolling down Bessie's cheeks, but Stowell saw that she was still looking up at him with the same expression.

"Meantime," he continued, "and however that may be, the Court has no choice but to condemn you to the punishment prescribed by law. We who sit here must act according to our oath and our duty. Justice" (he was pointing with a trembling hand to the motto under his father's picture) "is the most sacred thing on earth, and even .... even if your fellow-sinner himself sat on this bench, his first duty would be to Justice, for Justice is above all."

Then lowering his head and speaking rapidly, in a muffled and indistinguishable whisper, Stowell pronounced the sentence of death. None of it seemed to be clearly heard until he reached the last words ("and may God have mercy on your soul"), and then there came a loud scream from the dock.

Bessie, who had been leaning forward and listening intently (the look of hope and expectation on her face darkening to dismay and terror), had dropped back, and would have fallen but for Fenella, who had leapt up and caught her.

"Remove the prisoner," said the Governor sharply, and at the next moment the constables were carrying the girl out of Court screaming and sobbing.

But before she had gone there was a movement in the benches of the advocates. Alick Gell had risen again, with wild eyes, and he was shouting after her:

"Never mind, Bessie! I would rather be you than your Judge."

There was consternation in Court. Everybody was on his feet to look after the prisoner, and at Gell, who was being hustled out after her. But hardly had the door closed behind them, when there was another cry in Court:

"The Deemster!"

Stowell had risen also. He had stood looking after the prisoner until her last cry had died away in the corridor. Then he had turned about, as if intending to leave the bench, taken a step forward, stumbled, and dropped to one knee.

The Governor rose and reached forward to help him. But he recovered himself immediately. His face was very pale, but he smiled, a pitiful smile, as if saying, "A little dizziness, nothing more," and waved off assistance.

Bracing himself up, he stood aside for the Governor to go before him, and then walked out of Court with a firm step. The ring of his tread was plainly heard as he passed through the green baize door that led to the Deemster's room.

The spectators looked into each other's faces as if bewildered by what they had seen and heard. Although the business of the day was not yet over most of them trooped out, feeling that they had been witnessing a drama whereof only a part had been revealed to them—as by dark shadows on a white blind.

END OF FOURTH BOOK

FIFTH BOOK THE REPARATION

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE "VICTOR! VICTOR! MY VICTOR!"

"Good heavens, how was I to know that things would turn out so badly?"

It was the Governor, alone with Stowell in the Deemster's room, at the end of the second day of the Court of General Gaol Delivery.

"As for you, what have you to reproach yourself with? So far as this case is concerned you have done nothing that is wrong or irregular. The girl was guilty. You gave her a fair trial. The law required that she should be condemned. You had to condemn her. Then why take things so tragically?"

"But Fenella?"

"She will get over it. Of course she will. What sensible woman is going to throw away the happiness of a life-time because of something that happened before she came on to the scene?"

"You heard what she said, Sir?"

"I did, and thought it nonsense. I heard what you said also, and thought it madness. What a providential escape! Thank God it is all over! The miserable case is at an end. Let us think no more about it."

An Inspector of Police cams into the room to say that Miss Stanley had left the Castle at the close of the murder trial and asked him to tell her father that she was going home by train. The Governor, with knitted eyebrows and a frown, dismissed the Inspector, and then said to Stowell, as he turned to go,

"All the same I am bound to say the whole thing has been unfortunate—damnably unfortunate!"

Stowell continued to sit for some minutes in his robes after the Governor had left him. Joshua Scarff came with a glass of brandy.

"Take this, your Honour. It will strengthen your nerves for your drive home. I could see you were not well when you arrived this morning."

Stowell had drunk the brandy and was setting down the tumbler when the Inspector came back to say that after the murder trial he had liberated Dan Baldromma, but had just been compelled to arrest somebody else.

"Who else?"

"Mr. Gell. The gentleman seems to have gone clean off it, Sir. It's the loss of his case, I suppose."

Ever since the Court had risen he had been demanding to be allowed to see the Deemster and threatening what he would do to him. So to prevent the Advocate from doing a mischief the police had put him in the cells.

"Set him at liberty at once," said Stowell.

"Before your Honour leaves the Castle?"

"Instantly."

The Inspector being gone (with the intention of disobeying the Deemster's command in order to ensure his safety), Joshua Scarff proceeded to read Gell's conduct by quite a different light. It was easy to see now that Mr. Gell had been the girl's fellow-sinner and therefore the cause of her crime.

"Pity! Great pity!" said Joshua, as he helped Stowell to unrobe. "But such connections always begin to end badly."

There were still a few of the spectators at the gate, waiting to see the Deemster away, and when he came out, with his white face, another wave of sympathy went out to him.

"They've been putting the young colt into the shafts too soon—that's what it is, I tell thee."

Driving over the harbour bridge in his automobile Stowell began to feel better. The fresh air from the sea, after the close atmosphere of the Court-house, brought the blood back to his brain, and he thought he saw things more clearly.

The Governor had been right. He could not have acted otherwise without being false to his oath as a Judge. And if the miserable fact remained that he should never have been the Judge in this case at all, it was Fenella herself, above everybody else, who had thrust him into the furnace of that position. Surely she would remember this, and it would plead in her heart for him?

Half-a-mile beyond the town he passed the Governor's big blue landau, and realised that by some half-conscious impulse he was taking the road to Government House instead of the direct way home. So much the better! He must see Fenella at the first possible moment, and find out what his fate was to be.

His spirits rose as he bounded along. Granted he had done wrong in the first instance, terribly and cruelly wrong, hadn't he had many excuses? If Bessie Collister had told her everything, surely Fenella would see this, too, and seeing it, would understand?

But the great fact of all was that (except for the first catastrophe) his love of Fenella had been the root cause of all that had happened. If he had not loved Fenella with that deep, unconquerable, unquenchable love which had swept everything else away (all qualms and perhaps all conscience), nothing worse could have occurred. He would have married that poor girl now lying in prison. Yes, whatever the consequences to himself, he would have married her before Gell came back into her life, and further complications ensued. But after Fenella returned to the island no other woman had been possible to him. Surely she would see this also? And, if she did, nothing else would matter to either of them—nothing in this world.

Presently, driving at high speed, he realised that the half-conscious impulse which had carried him on to the road to Government House was sweeping him on to the rocky shelf on the coast along which he had driven with Fenella on the day he took his oath.

How fortunate! What was that she had said, then, as they sang together in the fulness of their joy over the hum of the engine and the boom of the sea?—that love, what she called love, never died and never changed, and if she loved anybody, and anything happened to him, she would fight the world for him, even though he were in the wrong!

Even though he were in the wrong!

She would do it now! He was sure she would! Yes, the first shock of the wretched revelation being over, she would see how he had suffered, and how he had striven to do the right, and then—then everything would be well.

Thus, as he flew over the roads, he built himself up in the hope of Fenella's forgiveness. But as he approached Government House his heart failed him again. Something whispered that the excuses he had been making for himself were no better than a pretence—that Fenella would see him now for the first time as the man he really was, not the man she had imagined him to be.

And then—what would happen then?

II

As soon as the trial was over and Bessie, weeping bitterly, was taken back to the cells, Fenella had left Castle Rushen. She was ashamed. Remembering her wild outburst under the Attorney-General's examination, she was reproaching herself bitterly.

Whatever Victor Stowell had done, what right had she to denounce him? She of all others! In open Court too!

And then Gell! Although nobody else had understood her, he had done so. He might have been living in a fool's paradise, but was it for her her to reveal the awful truth to him? In public, too, and at that harrowing moment?

To escape from the pain of self-reproach she kept on telling herself, as she went back in the train, that Stowell had deceived her. Oh, if he had only confessed, at any rate to her, she thought she could have forgiven him in spite of all. But no, he had hidden everything down to the last moment, and left her to find him out.

On reaching home she excused herself to old Miss Green and hurried up to her bedroom. Her head ached and her heart was sore—the young woman she had been working for had been found guilty and condemned. She told her maid she was tired, and if anybody asked for her she was not to be disturbed.

Two hours passed. Her heart was going through a wild riot of mingled anger and love. It was like madness. She loved Stowell; she hated him; she worshipped him; she despised him. At one moment she recalled with a bitter laugh the mockery of his questioning of Bessie Collister in the dock; at the next she remembered with scorching tears the pathos of his sentencing her.

Obscure motives were operating in her soul to intensify her pain. Jealous? She, jealous of that illiterate country girl who had murdered her illegitimate child—what nonsense! No, her idol was broken. She had set it so high and now it was in the dust.

She expected Stowell to come to her as soon as his Court was over. Again and again she raised her head from her wet pillow to listen for the sound of his car on the drive. Yet when a knock came at her door and her maid announced the arrival of the Deemster (never dreaming that the injunction against callers had been intended to apply to him) her first impulse was to send him away.

"Say I'm unwell and can't see him," she cried from her bed.

But at the next moment she was up and whispering at the door,

"Show Mr. Stowell into the library and tell him I shall be down presently."

Her voice was hoarse; her face was aflame; her eyes were red from persistent weeping. No water could sponge away those marks of her emotion. Never mind! He should see how he had made her suffer. She would go downstairs and charge him, face to face, with his deceit and hypocrisy, and then—then fling herself into his arms.

But when she opened the library door and saw him standing on the hearthrug, with head down and a look of utter abasement, her courage failed her. She dare not look twice at his ravaged face, so she sank on to the sofa and covered her eyes with her hands.

Several minutes passed in which neither of them spoke. There was no sound except that of his laboured breathing and of the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. "If he does not speak soon," she thought, "I shall break into tears and fly out of the room."

But she did not move, and at last came his voice, humble and broken, and thrilling through and through her:

"Fenella!"

She did not answer; she could not; and again, after another moment of silence, he said,

"Fenella, I have come to ask you to forgive me."

She wanted to burst out crying, and to prevent herself from doing so she broke into a flood of wrath.

"Forgive you?" she said. "Ask that poor creature in Castle Rushen to forgive you—that poor girl whom you have just condemned for a crime that is the consequence of your own sin."

He did not reply for a moment, and then came the same humble, unsteady voice, saying,

"No doubt you are quite right, quite justified, but if you knew everything—that I could not help myself—that it was the law...."

"Oh, I know nothing about your laws," she cried, leaping up and crossing the room, "but they are unjust and barbarous and against reason and humanity if they allow a girl to be condemned to death for a crime like that while the Judge who was the first cause of it sits in judgment on his own victim."

"You are right there too," said Stowell, "but if you knew how I tried to avoid sitting on the case, and only allowed myself to do so at last in the hope of seeing justice done and thereby making some sort of amends....

"Amends!" cried Fenella. "What amends can there be for a wrong like that? Oh, I hate people who think they can make amends for one fault by committing another."

There was silence again for a moment and then Stowell said,

"You are right there also. There is a kind of wrongdoing that cannot be atoned for. I see that now. But if you knew how I have suffered for it and still suffer....

"Suffer? Why shouldn't you suffer? Isn't that poor girl suffering? Hasn't she suffered all along? And whatever you do for her now, won't she go on suffering to the last day and hour of her life?"

He dropped his head still lower under the lash of Fenella's scorn.

"That is not all either," she said in a broken voice, sitting on the sofa again and brushing her handkerchief over her eyes. "Perhaps that girl is not the only one who is suffering. I wanted to think so well of you, to be so proud of you. You were to be the defender of women, fighting their battle for them when they were wronged and helpless. And when you became a Judge .... Oh, I cannot bear to think of it. You have disappointed and deceived me. You are not the man I took you to be."

Outside the sun was setting. A dull ray from it was falling on his haggard face and brushing her bronze-brown hair.

"I thought you loved me too. It was so sweet to think you loved me—me only—never having loved anybody else. Every woman has felt like that, hasn't she? I have anyway. Other men might be faithless, but not you, not Victor Stowell. And yet, for the sake of your poor fancy for this country girl...."

"Fenella!"

"Oh, what a fool I've been," she cried, leaping up again and dashing the tears from her eyes. "Forgive you? Never while that girl lies in prison as the consequence of your sin."

Stowell could bear no more. Stepping forward, he laid hold of Fenella by the shoulders, and approaching his face to her face he said,

"Listen to me, Fenella. I have done wrong—I know that. I am not here to excuse or defend myself, and if your heart does not plead for me I have nothing to say. But I swear before God that I have loved you with all my soul and strength, and if it hadn't been for that...."

"Loved me!" cried Fenella, between a laugh and a sob. And then in the wild delirium of the sheer woman, she said,

"What proof of your love have you given to me compared to the proof you have given to that girl? Oh, when I think of it I could almost find it in my heart to envy her. I do envy her. Yes, degraded and shamed and condemned and in prison as she is, I envy her, and could change places with her this very minute. I would have given you anything in the world rather than this should be—anything, my honour, myself...."

"Fenella!"

"Let me go! You are driving me mad. Leave me. I hate you. I despise you. You have broken my heart. I thought you were brave and true, but what are you but a common...."

"Fenella!"

"Coward! Hypocrite! Let me go!"

But she had no need to wrench herself away from him. His hands fell from her shoulders like lead, and at the next moment she was gone from the room.

He stood for a while where she had left him with the echo of her stinging words ringing in his ears. Bitter, unjust and cruel as they had been, he was struggling to excuse her. She did not understand. Bessie had not told her all. Presently she would come back and ask his pardon.

But she did not come, and after a while (it seemed like an eternity), feeling crushed, degraded, trampled upon, dragged in the dust and wounded in his tenderest affections, he left the room and the house.

Outside, where his automobile was standing, he still lingered, expecting to be called back. It was impossible that Fenella would let him part from her like this. He knew where she was—in the Governor's smoking-room which overlooked the drive. At the last moment she would knock at the window and cry, "Stay!"

Slowly he moved around his car, opening the bonnet, touching the engine, starting it, pulling on his long driving gloves. But still she gave no sign, and at length he prepared to step into his seat. Was this to be the end—the end of everything?

Meantime, Fenella, alone in her father's room and recovering from the storm of her anger, was beginning to be afraid. She wanted to go back to Stowell and say, "I was mad. I didn't know what I was saying. I love you so much."

But her pride would not permit her to do that, and she waited for Stowell to do something. Why didn't he burst through the door, throw his arms about her, and compel her to forgive him?

She listened intently for a long time, but there came no sound from the adjoining room. What was he doing? Presently she heard him coming out of the library, walking with a firm step down the corridor to the porch, opening the front door and closing it behind him.

Was he leaving her? Like this? Then he would never come back. She heard his footstep on the gravel and looking through the window she saw him, with his white face, raising his soft hat to wipe his perspiring forehead, and then climbing into the car. Could it be possible that he was going away without another word?

In spite of her jealousy and rage, she felt an immense admiration for the man who, loving her as she was sure he did, was yet so strong that he could leave her after she had insulted and humiliated him. She wanted to throw up the window and cry, "Wait! I am coming out to you."

But no, her pride would not permit her to do that either, and at the next instant the car was moving away.

She watched it until it had disappeared behind the trees. Then she turned to go back to her bedroom. At the foot of the stairs she met Miss Green who, shocked at the sight of her disordered face, said,

"My goodness, Fenella! What has happened?"

In the plaintive voice of a crying child, Fenella answered,

"He has gone. I have driven him away."

Then she stumbled upstairs, locked the door of her room on the inside, threw herself face down on the bed, burst into a flood of tempestuous tears, and cried aloud to Stowell, now that he could no longer hear her—

"Victor! Victor! My Victor!"

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO THE VOICE OF THE SEA

"Forgive you? Never while that girl lies in prison as the consequence of your sin."

The words beat on Stowell's brain with the paralysing effect of a muffled drum. He was driving up the mountain road. Char-à-bancs, full of English visitors (who were laughing and singing in chorus), were coming down. The drivers shouted at him from time to time. This irritated him until he realised that his motor-car was oscillating from side to side of the road.

When he reached the top, where the road turns towards the glen, all the heart was gone out of him. The great scene no longer brought the old joyousness. With love lost and hope quenched the soul of the world was dead, and the heavens were dark above him.

At the bottom of the glen, where it dips into the Curragh, he came upon a group of bare-headed women, with their arms under their aprons, surrounding a little person with watery eyes, in a poke bonnet and a satin mantle. Mrs. Collister had returned from Castletown, and her neighbours were taking her home.

"Never mind, woman! It will be all set right at the judgment. And then the man will be found out and punished, too!"

At the corner of the cross roads Dan Baldromma threw himself in front of the car, to draw it up, and in his raucous voice he fell on Stowell with a torrent of abuse.

"You've been locking up a respectable man, Dempster, but you can't lock up his tongue, and the island is going to know what justice in the Isle of Man can be."

Stowell made no answer. Any poor creature could insult him now.

Janet was waiting for him at Ballamoar, with a fire in the library, and the tea-tray ready. But the sweet home atmosphere only made him think of the happiness that had been so nearly within his reach.

Seeing that something was amiss, Janet assumed her cheeriest tone, brought out two patterns of damask, laid them over chairs, and asked which Fenella would like best for her boudoir.

"I don't know. I can't say. But .... it doesn't matter now."

Janet gathered up her patterns and went out of the room without a word.

"Forgive you? Never while that girl lies in prison." The stinging words followed him to his bedroom. They broke up his sleep. They rang like the screech of an owl through the darkness of the night.

Next day, not trusting himself to drive his car, he returned to Castletown by train. There were only two first-class compartments and both were full. He was about to step into a third-class carriage when a voice cried,

"This way, Deemster. Always room enough for you."

There was to be a sitting of the Keys that day and the compartment was full of northside members. The talk was about yesterday's trial, and Stowell realised that his management of the case had created a favourable impression. Merciful to the prisoner? Yes, until her guilt was established, but then just, even at the expense of friendship.

This led to talk about Gell as the girl's fellow-sinner.

"Shocking! But it's not the first time he has been mixed up with a woman."

Stowell felt an intolerable shame at Gell's undeserved obloquy and his own unmerited glory, but he could say nothing.

"It will kill the old man," said one of the Keys. The train had drawn up at a side station and his voice was loud in the vacant air.

"Hush!"

The Speaker was in the next compartment.

When the train started again a little man with the face of a ferret began to make facetious references to "Fanny." Stowell's hands were itching to take the ribald creature by the throat and fling him out of the window, but something whispered, "Who are you to be the champion of virtue?"

At Court that day, and the day following, he found it hard to concentrate. At one moment an advocate said,

"Perhaps your Honour is not well this morning?"

"Oh no! I heard you. You were saying...."

The rapidity of his mind enabled him to make up for his lapses in attention, and when his time came to sum up he was always ready.

He was indulgent to the accused. All the other prisoners were acquitted—the fat woman for the reason that, bad as her character might be, the characters of her drunken sailors were yet worse (therefore no credit could be attached to their evidence), and the boy who had embezzled on the ground that his superiors at the bank had been guilty of almost criminal negligence, and the four months he had been in prison already were sufficient to satisfy the claims of justice.

The boy's mother, who was standing at the back, threw her arms about him and kissed him when he stepped out of the dock, and then, turning her streaming face up to the bench, she cried,

"God bless you, Deemster! May you live long and every day of your life be a happy one."

Back at home, Stowell plunged into the task of drawing up the report for the English authorities which was to accompany the recommendation to mercy. In two days (having his father's library to fall back upon) he knew more about the grounds upon which the prerogative of the Crown could properly be exercised than anybody in the island had ever before been required to learn, and when he had finished his task he had no misgivings.

Bessie's sentence would be commuted to imprisonment. And then (life for the poor soul being at an end in the Puritanical old island) he must find some secret means of sending her away.

"Never while that girl...." But wait! Only wait!

Being legislator as well as Judge, he attended the first meeting of Tynwald Court after his appointment. The Governor administered the oath to him in a private room, and then, taking his arm, led the way to the legislative chamber.

"Do you know it's six days since you were at Government House, my boy? What is Fenella to think of you?"

"Has she .... has she been asking for me, Sir?"

"Well, no, not to say asking, but still .... six days, you know."

Stowell sat on a raised daïs between the Attorney-General and Deemster Taubman, who was sufficiently recovered to hobble in on two sticks. The proceedings were of the kind that is usual in such assemblies, the Manx people being the children of their mothers, loving to talk much and about many things.

He found it difficult to fix his attention, and was watching for an opportunity to slip away, when the vain repetitions which are called debate suddenly ceased and the Governor called on an Inspector by Police to carry round a Bill which had to be signed by all.

In the interval of general conversation that followed, Deemster Taubman, a gruff and grizzly person, leaned back in his seat, put his thumbs in the armholes of his soiled white waistcoat and talked to Stowell.

"You did quite right in that case of the girl Collister, Sir. In fact you were only too indulgent. I have no pity for the huzzies who run away from the consequences of their misconduct. Murder is murder, and there is no proper punishment for it but death."

"But the Jury recommended the girl to mercy, and her sentence will be commuted," said Stowell.

"Eh? Eh? Then you haven't heard what has happened?"

"What?"

"The Governor has reported against the recommendation."

"Reported against it?"

"Certainly. And as the authorities in London are not likely to read the report and are sure to act on the Governor's advice, the girl will go to the gallows."

Stowell felt as if he had been struck over the eyes by an unseen hand. As soon as he had signed the Bill (in a trembling scrawl) he whispered to the Attorney-General that he was unwell and fled from the chamber.

"Humph!" said Taubman, looking after him. "That young man is going to break down, and no wonder. His appointment as Deemster was the maddest thing I ever knew."

II

"No, Mr. Stowell, no! You must stay in bed for the next two days at least. I must really insist this time. No work, no excitement, no heart-strain. Remember your father, and take my advice, Sir."

It was Doctor Clucas, who, sent for by Janet, had arrived at Ballamoar before Stowell got out of bed in the morning.

With closed eyes Stowell reviewed the situation. It was shocking, horrible, intolerable. Not for fifty years had a woman suffered the full penalty of such a crime. He must find some way to prevent it.

But after a while a terrible temptation came to him. "Why can't I leave things alone?" he asked himself.

He had done all he could be expected to do. If the Crown, acting on the advice of the Governor, refused to exercise its prerogative of mercy, what right had he to interfere?

It might be best for himself, too, that the law should take its course—best in the long run. If Bessie's sentence were commuted to imprisonment what assurance had he that on coming out of prison she would allow him to send her away from the island? On the contrary she might refuse to be banished, and if she found that the blame of her misfortune had fallen on Gell she might tell the truth to free him.

What then? He would be a dishonoured man. His position as a Judge would be imperilled; his marriage with Fenella would be impossible, and his whole life would crash down to a welter of disgrace and ruin. But if Bessie were gone there would be no further danger. And after all, it would not be he but the law that had taken her life.

"Then why can't I leave things alone?" he thought.

He decided to do so, but his decision brought him no comfort. Towards evening he got up and went out to walk in the farmyard. There he met Robbie Creer, who was just home from the mill with his head full of a pitiful story.

It was about Mrs. Collister. Since her daughter's trial the old woman had fallen into the habit of walking barefoot in the glen, chiefly at midnight, and generally in the neighbourhood of the Clagh-ny-Dooiney. At first she had seen a light. Then she had heard a pitiful cry. She was certain it was the cry of a child, a spirit-child, unbaptised and therefore unnamed, and for that reason doomed to wander the world, because unable to enter Paradise. At length she had taken heart of God and going out in her nightdress she had called through the darkness of the trees, "If thou art a boy I call thee John. If thou art a girl I call thee Joney." After that she had heard the cry no more, and now she knew it had been Bessie's child, and the bogh-millish was at rest.

This story of the old mother's developing insanity rested heavily on Stowell's heart and went far to shake his resolution.

After a day or two he began to find his own house and grounds haunted. He could not go into the library without the kind eyes in his mother's picture following him about the room with a pleading look. He could not sit in the dining-room after dinner without remembering his week-ends as a student-at-law, when his father and he would draw up at opposite cheeks of the hearth, and the great Deemster would talk of the great crimes, the great trials and the great Judges.

But his worst ordeal was with Janet. Not a word of explanation had passed between them, yet he was sure she knew everything. One evening, going into her sitting-room, he found her with her knitting on her lap, and a copy of the insular newspaper on the floor, looking out on the lawn with a far-off expression. That brought memories of another evening when he had told her that no girl on the island had ever fallen into trouble through him, or ever should do.

"Ah! Is that you, Victor?" she cried, recovering herself and making her needles click, but he had gone, and her voice followed him from the room.

Still wrestling with his temptation to stand aside and let the law take its course, Ballamoar became intolerable to him. On the lame excuse of his fortnightly court in the northside town he decided to go to Ramsey, and wrote to Mrs. Quayle to get his old rooms ready.

But going from Ballamoar to his chambers was like leaping out of the fire into the furnace. When he opened a disordered drawer up came the Castletown portrait of Bessie Collister like a ghost out of the gloom. When he went for a walk to tire himself for the night his steps involuntarily turned towards the pier where the lighthouse had been shattered by lightning. When he returned and was putting the key in the lock of his outer door he had the tingling sense of a woman's warm presence behind him. When he pulled down his bedroom blind the broken cord brought a stabbing memory. And when he awoke in the morning he felt that he had only to open his eyes to see a girl's raven black hair on the pillow beside him.

But Mrs. Quayle's presence was the keenest torment of all. The good old Methodist moved about him at breakfast without speaking, but one morning, fumbling with her bonnet strings before going, she said,

"Deemster, have you remembered this case of Bessie Collister in your prayers?"

He removed to Douglas—the Fort Anne Hotel, a breezy place, which sits on the ledge of the headland and just over the harbour. At first the babble and movement of the hotel distracted him, but after a day or two he was drawn back into the maelstrom of his own thoughts.

Having a private sitting-room he borrowed law books from the Law Library and sat far into the night to read them. He selected the treatises on Infanticide—those bitter records of the age-long strife between the laws of man and of God. Particularly he read the charges of the British Judges (Scottish too frequently), the bewigged ruffians who, in the abomination of their Puritanical tyranny, and the brutal lust of their judicial vengeance, had hounded poor women to the gallows in the very nakedness of shame.

"Damn them! Damn them!" he would cry, leaping up with a desire to trample on the dead Judges' graves. But then the same persistent voice within would say, "Wait awhile! Who are you to stand up for justice and mercy?"

Crushed and ashamed he would creep up to bed through the silent house, and thinking of the girl whose dark eyes had intoxicated him in the glen (the girl he had afterwards held in his arms) he would say,

"Is it possible that I can stand by and see her given over to the hangman?"

That terrified him. In the darkness he pictured to himself the scene of Bessie's death and burial, and thought of his after-life as a Judge, when he would have to go to Court to try other such cases—and Bessie lying out there in the prison-yard.

After Ballamoar, with its pastoral tranquillity, the twittering of birds and the sleepy singing of the streams, Fort Anne was sometimes a tempestuous place, with the wash of the waves in the harbour, the monotonous moan of the sea outside and the melancholy wail of the gulls. He thought he heard Bessie's cry in the voice of the sea—her piercing cry when she was being carried out of Court after he had sentenced her.

One night he thought Bessie was dead. He was dead too. They were standing side by side in an awful tribunal and she was accusing him before God.

"He let me die! He killed me! He is my assassin!"

The sound of his own voice awakened him. A dream! It was the grey of dawn; a storm had risen in the night; the white sea was rolling over the breakwater and the sea-fowl were screaming through the mist and roar.

No, by God! If it was a question of Bessie witnessing against him in this world or in the next, he had no longer any doubt which it should be. No more temptations! No more hypocrisy and self-doubt! No more wandering about like a lost soul!

He would go up to the Governor. He would call upon him to withdraw his objection to the Jury's recommendation. And if he refused .... he should see what he should see.

At eight o'clock in the morning he was walking down the quay in the calm sunshine, looking at the activities of the harbour, and nodding cheerfully to the fishermen as he passed. He was on his way to Government House, and his conscience, with which he had wrestled so long, was triumphant and erect.

Then came a shock.

He was crossing the stone bridge that leads up to the town when he saw the Governor's blue landau coming down in the direction of the railway station. It was open. Fenella was sitting in it.

Stowell was certain she saw him. But she only coloured up to the eyes and dropped her head. At the next instant her carriage had crossed in front of him and swept into the station-yard.

Something surged in his throat; something blinded his eyes. But after a moment he threw up his head and walked firmly forward.

"Wait! Only wait! We'll see!"

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE THE HEART OF A WOMAN

Meanwhile Fenella had been going through her own temptation. On the night after the trial, having bathed her swollen eyes, she went down to dinner. Her father looked searchingly at her for a moment, and, as soon as they were alone, he said,

"Was it Stowell I saw driving towards the mountain road as I came up?"

"Perhaps it was," said Fenella.

"Then why didn't he stay to dinner?"

"Because .... I told him to go."

"Why?"

Fenella gulped down the lump that was rising in her throat and said,

"I have been deceived in him. He is not the man I supposed him to be."

"Don't be a fool, my dear. I understand what you mean. It is his conduct as a man, not as a Judge you are thinking of. But if every woman in the world thought she had a right to make a scrutiny into her husband's life before she married him there would be a fine lot of marriages, wouldn't there?"

Crude and even coarse as Fenella thought her father's moral philosophy, she found her self-righteousness shaken by it. Perhaps she had been unfair to Stowell. But why didn't he come and plead his own cause? She couldn't talk to her father, but if Victor came and told his own story....

Victor did not come. For two days her pride fought with her love and she thought herself the unhappiest woman in the world. Then to escape from the pains of self-reproach she conceived the idea of a fierce revenge upon Stowell. She would devote herself to his victim! Yes, she would make it her duty to lighten the lot of the poor creature he had ruined and deserted.

After a struggle, and many shameful tears, she went back to Castle Rushen, little knowing what a scorching flame she was to pass through.

By this time Bessie was feeling no bitterness against Stowell. The jailer had told her that the Deemster could not have acted otherwise. The law compelled him to condemn her. But he had told the Jury to recommend her to mercy, and now he would be writing to the King to ask him to let her off.

"Aw, he's good, miss—he's real good for all."

"Do you say that, Bessie? After he has betrayed you?" said Fenella,

"Betrayed? I wouldn't say that, miss."

"But he .... he took you to his rooms?"

"What else could he do, miss? All the inns were shut and it was raining, and I had nothing in my pocket."

"But .... having taken advantage of your homelessness and poverty, he afterwards cast you off?"

A mysterious wave of injured vanity struggled with Bessie's shame and she said,

"'Deed he didn't, then. He wanted to marry me."

"Marry you .... did you say marry...."

"Yes, he did, and that was why he sent me to school."

"But afterwards .... afterwards he changed his mind and turned you off .... I mean turned you over to somebody else?"

"'Deed no," said Bessie, with her chin raised. "It was me that gave him up after I found I was fonder of Alick."

Breathing hard, scarcely able to speak, with the hot blood rushing to her cheeks, Fenella compelled herself to go on.

"Did he know then that you...."

"No, miss, and neither did I, nor Alick, nor anybody."

"And when .... when was it that you went...."

"To his rooms in Ramsey? The first Saturday in August, miss."

Fenella went home, happy, miserable, tingling with shame and yet thrilling with love also. Stowell's victim had brought her heart back to him.

It was just because he had loved her more than he had loved that girl in prison that the worst had happened. It was just because she herself had persuaded, constrained and almost compelled him that he had sat on the case, not fully knowing what was to be revealed by it.

This lasted her half-way home in the train, and then her wounded pride rose again. After all Victor had been faithless to the love with which she had inspired him. If a man loved a woman it was his duty to keep himself pure for her. Victor had not done so, therefore she would never forgive him—never!

The Governor's carriage met her at the Douglas station, and when (wiping the scorching tears from her eyes) she reached Government House, she found another carriage standing by the porch.

"Miss Janet Curphey is here to see you, miss," said the maid.

II

From the day of the trial, when Victor had returned home with a white face and said, "It doesn't matter now," Janet had known what had occurred.

That Collister girl had corrupted Victor. She had always feared it would be so since "Auntie Kitty" had whispered over her counter that that "forward thing" of Liza Corteen's was boasting that Mr. Stowell had been "sooreying" with her in the glen. And now she had brought him under the very shadow of shame itself, just when life looked so bright and joyful.

Then came the insular newspaper with an account of Fenella's outburst at the trial. That was the cruellest blow of all. She had loved Fenella, and had always thought there would be nothing so sweet as to spread her wedding-bed for her, but now that she had taken sides against Victor and publicly denounced him, Janet's blood boiled. She would go up to Government House and give Fenella a piece of her mind. Why shouldn't she?

It was a dull afternoon when she set off for Douglas, and as she drove along the coast road she rehearsed to herself the sharp things she was going to say.

But when Fenella came into the drawing-room, looking so pale as to be scarcely recognisable as the radiant girl she used to be, and kissed her and sat by her side, Janet could scarcely say anything.

At length (Miss Green, who had been sitting at tea with her, having gone) Janet braced herself, and said, not without a tremor,

"I've come about Victor."

"Then he has told you?" said Fenella.

"'Deed he hasn't, and you needn't either, because I know."

Fenella drew her hand away and dropped her head.

"I don't say he hasn't done wrong," said Janet, "but you seem to think he's the only one who is to blame."

"Oh no! I see now that the girl in Castle Rushen...."

"The girl? I'm not thinking about the girl. Of course she is to blame. But is there nobody else to blame also?"

"Who else?"

"Yourself."

"Janet!"

"Oh, I'm telling you the truth, dear. That's what I've come for."

"But it all happened before I returned to the Island."

"That's why. If you hadn't stayed away so long it wouldn't have happened at all."

Then up from the sweet and sorrowful places of Janet's memory came the story of Stowell's love for Fenella—how he had worked for her and waited for her through all his long years as a student-at-law.

"It's me to know, my dear. He used to come home every week-end, and his poor father thought it was to see him, but I knew better. 'Any fresh news?' he would say, and I knew what news he wanted. When your photo came he held it under the lamp and said, 'Don't you think she's like my mother, Janet—just a little like?' And I told him yes, and that was to say you were like the loveliest woman that ever walked the world—in this island anyway."

Fenella was struggling to control herself.

"Poor boy, how he worked and worked for you! Jacob never worked harder or waited longer for Rachel. And what was his reward? You signed on at your ridiculous Settlement for seven years and sent word you would never marry. I had it from Catharine Green and it was a sorrowful woman I was to break the news to him. He looked at me with his mother's eyes, and it was fit enough to break my heart to see how he cried with his face on the pillow. But it was with his father's eyes he rose and said, 'It shall never happen again, mother.' He called me mother too, God bless him!"

Fenella was smothering her mouth in her handkerchief.

"If he went wrong after that, was it any wonder? Young men are young men, and the Lord won't be too hard on them for being what He has made them. Some people seem to think when trouble comes between a young man and a young woman that the young woman is the only one to be pitied. Well, I'm a woman and I don't. And when a young man has been cut off from the love that would have kept him right and the heavens have gone dark on him...."

"But I loved him all the time, Janet."

"Then why didn't you come back, instead of leaving him to the mercy of these good-looking young vixens who will run any risks with a young man if they can only get him to marry them?"

Fenella's eyes were down again.

"But that's not all. Not content with deserting him for so many years, you must try to disgrace him also."

"Janet!"

"Oh, I saw what you said at the trial."

"But nobody knows whom I...."

"Don't they indeed! The men may not—most of them are so stupid. They may even think you meant somebody else. But you can't deceive the women like that. And then he knew that you intended it for him. Just when you were about to become his wife, too, and you were the only woman in the world to him!"

"I was so shocked. I thought he wasn't the man I had taken him for."

"Perhaps he wasn't, perhaps he was, but thousands of women have lost faith in their men and clung to them for all that, and they're the salt of the earth, I say. I'm only an old maid myself, but to stand up for your husband, right or wrong, that's what I call being a wife, if you ask me."

Fenella could bear up no longer. She flung her arms about Janet's neck and buried her face in her breast.

The darkness was gathering before they broke from their embrace and then it was time for Janet to smooth out her silvery hair and go. Fenella saw her to the carriage and whispered as she kissed her,

"Tell him to come back to me."

And then Janet went home with shining eyes.