Complete works of hall c.., p.567
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 567
How much the Deemster had learnt of his trouble he never knew, but one night, as they drew up to the cheeks of the hearth after dinner, he said:
“Victor, how would you like to go round the world? Travel is good for a young man. It helps him to get things into proportion.”
Victor leapt at the prospect of escaping from Ballamoar, but thought it seemly to say something about the expense.
“That needn’t trouble you,” said the Deemster, “and you wouldn’t be beholden to me either, for there is something I have never told you.”
His mother had had a fortune of her own, and the last act of her sweet life had been to make it over to her new-born son, at the discretion of his father, signing her dear will a few minutes before she died, against every prayer and protest, in the tragic and un-recognizable handwriting of the dying.
“It was five hundred a year then,” said the Deemster, “but I’ve not touched it for twenty-four years, so it’s nine hundred now.”
“That’s water enough to his wheel, I’m thinking,” said Dan Baldromma, when he heard of it, and Caesar Qualtrough was known to say:
“It’s a horse that’ll drive him to glory or the devil, and I belave in my heart I’m knowing which.”
Two months later Victor Stowell was ready for his journey. Alick Gell was to go with him that gentleman having scrambled through his examination and prevailed on his mother to prevail on his father to permit him to follow Stowell.
“God’s sake, woman,” the Speaker had said again, “let him go, and give him the allowance he asks for, and bother me no more about him.”
Turning westward the young travellers crossed the Atlantic; stood in awe on the ship’s deck at their first sight of the new world, with its great statue of Liberty to guard its portals; passed over the breathless American continent, where life scours and roars through Time like a Neap tide on a shingly coast, casting up its pebbles like spray; then through Japan, where it flows silent and deep, like a mill race under adumbrous overgrowth; and so on through China, India and Egypt and back through Europe.
It was a wonderful tour to Gell like sitting in the bow of a boat where the tumult of life was for ever smiting his face in freshening waves; to Stowell (for the first months at least) like sitting miserably in the stern, with only the backwash visible that was carrying him away, with every heave of the sea, from something he had left and lost.
But before long Stowell’s heavy spirit regained its wings. Although he could not have admitted it even to himself without a sense of self- betrayal, Fenella Stanley’s face, in the throng of other and nearer faces, became fainter day by day. There are no more infallible physicians for the heart-wounds inflicted by women than women themselves, and when a man is young, and in the first short period of virginal manhood, the world is full of them.
So it came to pass that whatever else the young men saw that was wonderful and marvellous in the countries they passed through, they were always seeing women’s eyes to light and warm them. And being handsome and winsome themselves their interest was rewarded according to the conditions sometimes with a look, sometimes with a smile, and sometimes in the freer communities, with a handful of confetti or a bunch of spring flowers flung in their faces, or perhaps the tap of a light hand on their shoulders.
Thus the thought of Fenella Stanley, steadily worn down in Victor’s mind, became more and more remote as time and distance separated them, until at length there were moments when it seemed like a shadowy memory.
Stowell and Gell were two years away, and when they returned home the old island seemed to them to have dwarfed and dwindled, the very mountains looking small and squat, and the insular affairs, which had once loomed large, to have become little, mean and almost foolish.
“Now they’ll get to work; you’ll see they will,” said Janet, and for the first weeks it looked as if they would.
For the better prosecution of then- profession, as well as to remove the sense of rivalry, they took chambers in different towns, Stowell in Old Post Office Place in Ramsey, and Gell in Preaching House Lane in Douglas two outer rooms each for offices and two inner ones for residential apartments.
But having ordered their furniture and desks, inscribed their names in brass on their door-posts, (“VICTOR STOWELL, Advocate”), engaged junior assistants to sit on high stools and take the names of the clients who might call, and arranged for sleeping-out housekeepers to attend to their domestic necessities (Victor’s was a comfortable elderly body, Mrs. Quayle, once a servant of his mother’s at Ballamoar, afterwards married to a fisherman, and then left a widow, like so many of her class, when our hungry sea had claimed her man), they made no attempt to practise, being too well off to take the cases of petty larceny and minor misdemeanour which usually fall to the High Bailiff’s Court, and nobody offering them the cases proper to the Deemster’s.
Those were the days of Bar dinners (social functions much in favour with our unbriefed advocates), and one such function was held in honour of the returned travellers. At this dinner Stowell, being the principal speaker, gave a racy account of the worlds they had wandered through, not forgetting the world of women the sleepy daintiness of the Japanese, the warm comeliness of the Italian, the vivacious loveliness of the French, and above all, the frank splendour of the American women, with their free step, their upturned faces and their conquering eyes.
That was felt by various young Manxmen to be a feast that could be partaken of more than once, so a club was straightway founded for the furtherance of such studies. It met once a week at Mount Murray, an old house a few miles out of Douglas, in the middle of a forest of oak and pine trees, now an inn, but formerly the home of a branch of the Athols, when they were the Lords of Man, and kept a swashbuckler court of half-pay officers who had come to end their days on the island because the living and liquor were cheap.
One room of this house, the dining-room, still remained as it used to be when the old bloods routed and shouted there, though its coat-of-arms was now discoloured by damp and its table was as worm-eaten as their coffins must have been. And here it was that the young bloods of the” Elian Vannin” (the Isle of Man) held their weekly revel riding out in the early evening on then- hired horses, twenty or thirty together, sitting late over their cups and pipes, and (the last toast drunk and the last story told) breaking up in the dark of the morning, stumbling out to the front, where a line of lanterns would be lining the path, the horses champing the gravel and the sleepy stable-boys chewing their quids to keep themselves awake, and then leaping into their saddles, singing their last song at the full bellows of their lungs in the wide clearing of the firs to the wondering sky, and galloping home, like so many Gilpins (as many of them as were sober enough to get there at the same time as their mounts) and clattering up the steep and stony streets of Douglas to the scandal of its awakened inhabitants.
Victor Stowell was president of the” Elian Vannin,” and in that character he made one contribution to its dare-devil jollity, which terminated its existence and led to other consequences more material to this story.
II
In his heavy days at Ballamoar, before he went abroad, his father’s house had been like a dam to which the troubled waters of the island flowed the little jealousies and envies of the island community, the bickerings of church and chapel, of town and country, of town and town, not to speak of the darker maelstrom of more unworthy quarrels. While the Deemster had moved through all this with his calm dignity as the great mediator, the great pacifier, Victor with his quick brain and wounded heart had stood by, seeing all and saying nothing, But now, making a call upon his memory, for the amusement of his fellow clubmen, out of sheer high spirits and with no thought of evil, he composed a number of four-line” Limericks” on the big- wigs of the island.
Such scorching irony and biting satire had never been heard in the island before. If any pompous or hypocritical person (by preference a parson, a local preacher, a High Bailiff or a Key) had a dark secret, which he would have given his soul’s salvation not to have disclosed, it was held up, under some thin disguise, to withering ridicule.
A long series of these reckless lampoons Victor fired off weekly over the worm-eaten table at Mount Murray, to the delirious delight of the clubmen, who, learning them by heart, carried them to their little world outside, with the result that they ran over the island like a fiery cross and set the Manx people aroar with laughter.
The good, and the unco’ good were scandalized, but the victims were scarified. And to put an end to their enemy, and terminate his hostilities, these latter, laying their heads together to tar him with his own brush, found a hopeful agency to their hand in the person of a good-looking young woman of doubtful reputation called Fanny, who kept a house of questionable fame in the unlit reaches of the harbour south of the bridge.
One early morning word went through the town like a searching wind that Fanny’s house had been raided by the police, in the middle of the night, about the hour when the Clubmen usually clattered back to Douglas. The raid had been intended to capture Stowell, but had failed in its chief object that young gentleman having gone on, when some of his comrades had stopped, put up his horse at his job-master’s and proceeded to Cell’s chambers where he slept on his nights in town. Others of his company had also escaped by means of a free fight, in which they had used the hunting crops and the police their truncheons. But Alick Gell, with his supernatural capacity for getting into a scrape, had been arrested and carried off, with Fanny herself, to the Douglas lock-up.
Next day these two were brought up in the Magistrate’s Court, which was presided over by his Worship the Colonel of the “Nunnery,” a worthy and dignified man, to whom the turn of recent events was shocking. The old Court-house was crowded with the excited townspeople, and as many of the Clubmen were present as dare show their bandaged heads out of their bedrooms.
When the case was called, and the two defendants entered the dock, they made a grotesque and rather pitiful contrast Gell in his tall, slim, fair-haired gentlernanliness, and Fanny in her warm fat comeliness, decked out in some gaudy finery which she had sent home for, having been carried off in the night with streaming locks and naked bosom.
In the place of the Attorney- General, the prosecutor was a full-bodied, elderly advocate named Hudgeon, who had been the subject of one of the most withering of the lampoons. He opened with bitter severity, spoke of the case as the worst of the kind the island had known; referred to the” most unholy hour of the morning” which had lately been selected for scenes of unseemly riot; said his “righteous indignation” was roused at such disgraceful doings, and finally hoped the Court would, for the credit of lawyers” hereafter” make an example, “without respect of persons,” of the representative of a group of young roysterers, who were a disgrace to the law, and had nothing better to do (so rumour and report were saying) than to traduce the good names of their elders and betters.
When he had examined the constables and closed his case it looked as if Gell were in danger of Castle Rushen, and the consequent wrecking of his career at the Bar, and that nothing was before Fanny but banishment from the island, with such solace as the bribe of her employers might bring her.
But then, to a rustle of whispering, Stowell, who was in wig and gown for the first time, got up for the defence. It had been expected that he would do so, and many old advocates who had heard much of him, had left their offices, and filled the advocates’ box, to see for themselves what mettle he was made of.
They had not long to wait. In five minutes he had made such play with his” learned friend’s”“unholy hour of the morning,”“his righteous indignation” and his” hereafter” for lawyers (not without reference to a traditional personage with horns and a fork) that the merriment of the people in Court rose from a titter to a roar, which the ushers were powerless to suppress. Again and again the writhing prosecutor, with flaming face and foaming and spluttering mouth, appealed in vain to the Bench, until at length, getting no protection, and being lashed by a wit more cutting than a whip, he gathered up his papers and, leaving the case to his clerk, fled from the Court like an infuriated bat, saying he would never again set foot in it.
Then Stowell, calling back the constables, confused them, made them contradict themselves, and each other, and step down at last like men whose brains had fallen into their boots. After that he called Gell and caused him to look like a harmless innocent who had strayed out of a sheepfold into a shambles. And finally he called Fanny, and getting quickly on the woman’s side of her, he so coaxed and cajoled and flattered and then frightened her, that she seemed to be on the point of blurting out the whole plot, and giving away the names of half the big men in the island.
His Worship of the Nunnery closed up the case quickly, saying “young men will be young men,” but regretting that the eminent talents exhibited in the defence were not being employed in the service of the island.
The Court-house emptied to a babel of talking and a burst of irrepressible laughter, and that was the end of the “Elian Vannin.” But the one ineffaceable effect of the incident, most material to this story, was that Alick Gell, who was still as innocent as the baby of a girl, had acquired a reputation for dark misdoings (especially with women) whereof anything might be expected in the future.
After the insular newspapers had dwelt with becoming severity on this aspect of the” distressing proceedings,” the Speaker walked over in full-bearded dignity to remonstrate with the Deemster.
“Your son is dragging my lad down to the dirt,” he said, “and before long I shall not be able to show my face anywhere.”
“What do you wish me to do, Mr. Speaker?” asked the Deemster. “Do? Do? I don’t know what I want you to do,” said the Speaker.
“I thought you didn’t,” said the Deemster, and then the full-bearded dignity disappeared.
Concerning Victor, although he had made the island laugh (the shortest cut to popularity), opinions were widely divided.
“There’s only the breadth of a hair between that young man and a scoundrel,” said Hudgeon, the advocate.
“Lave him rope and he’ll hang himself,” said Caesar Qualtrough, from behind his pipe in the smoking-room of the Keys.
“Clever! Clever uncommon! But you’ll see, you’ll see,” said the Speaker.
“I’ve not lost faith in that young fellow yet,” said the Governor.
“Some great fact will awaken a sense of responsibility and make a man of him.”
The great fact was not long in coming, but few could have foreseen the source from which it came.
III
With the first breath of the first summer after their return to the island Stowell and Gell went up into the glen to camp. They had no tent; two hammocks swung from neighbouring trees served them for beds and the horizontal boughs of other trees for wardrobes. There, for a long month, amidst the scent of the honeysuckle, the gorse and the heather, and the smell of the bracken and the pine, they fished, they shot, they smoked, they talked. Late in the evening, after they had rolled themselves into their hammocks, they heard the murmuring of the trees down the length of the glen, like near and distant sea-waves, and saw, above the soaring pine-trunks, the gleaming of the sky with its stars. As they shouted their last “Good-night” to each other from the depths of their swaying beds the dogs would be barking at Dan Baldromma’s mill at the bottom of the glen and the water would be plashing in the topmost fall of it. And then night would come, perfect night, and the silence of unbroken sleep.
Awaking with the dawn they would see the last stars pale out and hear the first birds begin to call; then the cock would crow at old Will Skillicorne’s croft on the “brough,” the sheep would bleat in the fields beyond, the squirrels would squeak in the branches over their heads and the fish would leap in the river below. And then, as the sun came striding down on them from the hill-tops to the east, they would tumble out of their hammocks, strip and plunge into the glen stream the deep, round, blue dubs of it, in which the glistening water would lash their bodies like a living element. And then they would run up to the headland (still in the state of nature) and race over the heather like wild horses in the fresh and nipping air.
They were doing this one midsummer morning when they had an embarrassing experience, which, in the devious ways of destiny, was not to be without its results. Flying headlong down the naked side of the glen (for sake of the faster run) they suddenly became aware of somebody coming up. It was a young woman in a sun-bonnet. She was driving four or five heifers to the mountain. Swishing a twig in her hand and calling to her cattle, she was making straight for their camping-place.
The young men looked around, but there was no escape on any side, so down they went full length on their faces in the long grass (how short!) and buried their noses in the earth.
In that position of blind helplessness, there was nothing to do but wait until the girl and her cattle had passed, and hope to be unobserved. They could hear the many feet of the heifers, the napping of their tails (the flies must be pestering them) and the frequent calls of the girl. On she came, with a most deliberate slowness, and her voice, which had been clear and sharp when she was lower down the glen, seemed to them to have a gurgling note in it as she came nearer to where they lay.
“Come out of that, you gawk, and get along, will you?” she cried, and Victor could not be quite sure that it was only the cattle she was calling to.
At one moment, when they thought the girl and the cattle must be very close, there was a sickening silence, and then the young men remembered their breeches which were hanging open over a bough and their shirts which were dangling at the end of it.
