Complete works of hall c.., p.569
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 569
“God bless you for saying that, dear! I knew you would! And don’t think your silly old Janet believed the lying stories they told of you. ‘Deed no, that she didn’t and never will do, never! But all the same a young man can’t be too careful!”
There were bad girls about also real scheming, designing huzzies! Some of them were good-looking young vixens too, for it wasn’t the good ones only that God made beautiful. And when a man was young and handsome and clever and charming and well-off and had all the world before him, they threw themselves in his way, and didn’t mind what disgrace they got into if they could only compel him to marry them.
“But think of a slut like that coming to live as mistress here here in the house of Isobel Stowell!”
Then the men folk of such women were as bad as they were. There was a wicked, lying, evil spirit abroad these days that Jack was as good as his master, and if you were up you had to be pulled down, and if you were big you had to be made little.
“Only think what a cry these people would make if anything happened,” said Janet, “wrecking your career perhaps, and making promotion impossible.”
“Don’t be afraid of that either, Janet. I can take care of myself, you know.”
“So you can, dear,” said Janet,” but then think of your father. Forty years a judge, and not a breath of scandal has ever touched him! But that’s just why some of these dirts would like to destroy him, calling to him in the Courts themselves, perhaps, with all the dirty tongues at them, to come down from the judgment-seat and set his own house in order.”
“My father can take care of himself, too, Janet,” said Victor.
“I know, dear, I know,” said Janet.” But think what he’ll suffer if any sort of trouble falls on his son! More, far more, than if it fell on himself. That’s the way with fathers, isn’t it? Always has been, I suppose, since the days of David. Do you remember his lamentation over his son Absalom? I declare I feel fit enough to cry in Church itself whenever the Vicar reads it: ‘O my son, Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.”
There was silence for a moment, for Victor found it difficult to speak, and then Janet began to plead with him in the name of his family also.
“The Deemster is seventy years old now,” she said,” and he has four hundred years of the Ballamoars behind him, and there has never been a stain on the name of any of them. That’s always been a kind of religion in your family, hasn’t it that if a man belongs to the breed of the Ballamoars he will do the right he can be trusted? That’s something to be born to, isn’t it? It seems to me it is more worth having than all the jewels and gold and titles and honours the world has in it. Oh, my dear, my dear, you know what your father is; he’ll say nothing, and you haven’t a mother to speak to you; so don’t be vexed with your old Janet who loves you, and would die for you, if she could save you from trouble and disgrace; but think what a terrible, fearful, shocking thing it would be for you, and for your father, and for your family, and …. yes, for the island itself if anything should happen now.”
“Nothing shall happen I give you my word for that, Janet,” said Victor.
“God bless you!” said Janet, and rising and reaching over in the darkness she kissed him her face was wet.
After that she laughed, in a nervous way, and said she wasn’t a Puritan either, like some of the people in those parts whom she saw on Sunday mornings, walking from chapel in their chapel hats, after preaching and praying against “carnal transgression” and “bodily indulgence” and “giving way to the temptations of the flesh” as if they hadn’t as many children at home as there were chickens in a good-sized hen-roost.
“Young men are young men and girls are girls,” said Janet,” and some of these Manx girls are that pretty and smart that they are enough to tempt a saint. And if David was tempted by the beauty of Bathsheba and we’re told he was a man after God’s own heart what better can the Lord expect of poor lads these days who are making no such pretensions?”
She was only an old maid herself, but she supposed it was natural for a young man to be tempted by the beauty of a young woman, or the Lord wouldn’t have allowed it to go on so long. But the moral of that was that it was better for a man to marry.
“So find a good woman and marry her, dear. The Deemster will be delighted, having only yourself to follow him yet. And as for you,” she added (her voice was breaking again),” you may not think it now, being so young and strong, but when you are as old as I am …. and feeling feebler every year …. and the world is growing cold and lonely …. and you are looking to the dark day that is coming …. and no one of your own to close your eyes for you... only hired servants, or strangers, perhaps....”
It was Victor’s turn to rise now, and to stop her speaking by taking her in his arms. After a moment, not without a tremor in his own voice also, he said, “I shall never marry, and you know why, Janet. But neither will I bring shame on my father, or stain my name, as God is my help and witness.”
The rooks were silent hi the elms by this time, but the gong was sounding in the hall, so, laughing and crying together, and with all her trouble gone like chased clouds, Janet ran off to her room to wipe her eyes and fix her cap before showing her face at supper.
III
Next morning the Deemster returned from Douglas, and in the afternoon, the Governor arrived. They took tea on the piazza, the days being long and the evenings warm.
The Deemster was uneasy about the case they had tried the day before, and talked much about it. A farmer had killed a girl on his farm after every appearance of gross ill-usage. The crime and the motive had been clear and therefore the law could show no clemency. But there had been external circumstances which might have affected the man’s conduct. Down to ten years before he had been a right-living man, clean and sober and honest and even religious. Then he had been thrown by a young horse and kicked on the head and had had to undergo an operation. After he came -out of the hospital his whole character was found to have changed. He had become drunken, dishonest, a sensualist and a foul-mouthed blasphemer, and finally he had committed the crime for which he now stood condemned.
“It makes me tremble to think of it,” said the Deemster,” that a mere physical accident, a mere chance, or a mere spasm of animal instinct, may cause any of us at any time to act in a way that is utterly contrary to our moral character and most sincere resolutions.”
“It’s true, though,” said the Governor, “and it doesn’t require the kick of a horse to make a man act in opposition to his character. The loudest voice a man hears is the call of his physical nature, and law and religion have just got to make up their minds to it.”
Next morning, Sunday morning, they went to church. Janet drove in the carriage by way of the high road, but the three men walked down the grassy lane at the back, which, with its gorse hedges on either side, looked like a long green picture in a golden frame. The Deemster, who walked between the Governor and Victor, was more than usually bent and solemn. He had had an anonymous letter about his son that morning he had lately had shoals of them.
The morning was warm and quiet; the clover fields were sleeping in the sunlight to the lullaby of the bees; the slumberous mountains behind were hidden in a palpitating haze, and against the broad stretch of the empty sea in front stood the gaunt square tower from which the far-off sound of the church bells was coming.
Nowhere in the island could they have found a more tragic illustration of the law of life they had talked about the evening before than in the person of the Vicar of the Church they were going to.
His name was Cowley, and down to middle life he had been all that a clergyman should be. But then he had lost a son under circumstances of tragic sorrow. The boy had been threatened with a consumption, so the father had sent him to sea, and going to town to meet him on his return to the island, he had met his body instead, as it was being brought ashore from his ship, which was lying at anchor in the bay.
The sailors had said that at sight of them and their burthen, Parson Cowley had fallen to the stones of Ramsey harbour like a dead man, and it was long before they could bring him to, or staunch the wound on his forehead. What is certain is that after his recovery he began to drink, and that for fifteen years he had been an inveterate drunkard.
This had long been a cause of grief and perhaps of shame to his parishioners; but it had never lessened their love of him, for they knew that in all else he was still a true Christian. If any lone ‘; widow man” lay dying in his mud cabin on the Curragh, Parson Cowley would be there to sit up all the night through with him; and if any barefooted children were going to bed hungry in the one-roomed hovel that was their living-room, sleeping-room, birth-room and death-room combined, Parson Cowley would be seen carrying them the supper from his own larder.
But his weakness had become woeful, and after a shocking moment in which he had staggered and fallen before the altar, a new Bishop, who knew nothing of the origin of his infirmity, and was only conscious of the scandal of it, had threatened that if the like scene ever occurred again he would not only forbid him to exercise his office, but call upon the Governor (in whose gift it was) to remove him from his living.
The bells were loud when the three men reached the whitewashed church on the cliff, with the sea singing on the beach below it, and Illiam Christian, the shoemaker and parish clerk, standing bare-headed at the bottom of the outside steps to the tower to give warning to the bell-ringers that the Governor had arrived.
In expectation of his visit the church was crowded, and with Victor going first to show the way, the Governor next, and the Deemster last, with his white head down, the company from Ballamoar walked up the aisle to the family pew, in which Janet, in her black silk mantle, was already seated.
The Deemster’s pew was close to the communion rails, and horizontal to the church with the reading-desk and pulpit in the open space in front of it, and a marble tablet on the wall behind, containing the names of a long line of the Ballamoars, going as far back as the sixteenth century.
The vestry was at the western end of the church, under the tower, and as soon as the bells stopped and the clergy came out, it was seen that the Vicar was far from sober. Nevertheless he kept himself erect while coming through the church behind his choir and curate, and tottered into the carved chair within the rail of the communion.
The curate took the prayers, and might have taken the rest of the service also, but the Vicar, thinking his duty compelled him to take his part in the presence of the Governor, rose to read the lessons. With difficulty he reached the reading-desk, which was close to the Deemster’s pew, and opened the book and gave out the place. But hardly had he begun, in a husky and indistinct voice, with” Here beginneth the first chapter of the Second Book of Samuel” (for it was the sixth Sunday after Trinity) when he stopped as if unable to go farther.
For a moment he fumbled with his spectacles, taking them off and wiping them on the sleeve of his surplice, and then he began afresh. But scarcely had he said, in a still thicker voice,” Now it came to pass”.... when he stopped again, as if the words of the Book before him had run into each other and become an unreadable jumble.
After that he looked helplessly about him for an instant, as if wondering what to do. Then he grasped the reading-desk with his two trembling hands, and the perspiration was seen to be breaking in beads from his forehead.
A breathless silence passed over the church. The congregation saw what was happening, and dropped their heads, as if knowing that for their beloved old Vicar this (before the eyes of the Governor) was the end of everything.
But suddenly they became aware that something was happening. Quietly, noiselessly, almost before they were conscious of what he was doing, Victor Stowell, who had been sitting at the end of the Deemster’s pew, had risen, stepped across to the reading-desk, put a soft hand on the Vicar’s arm, and was reading the lesson for him.
“Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.... I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”
People who were there that morning said afterwards that never before had the sublime lament of the great King, the great warrior and the great poet, for his dead friend and dead enemy been read as it was read that day by the young voice, so rich and resonant, that was ringing through the old church.
But it was not that alone that was welling through every bosom. It was the thrilling certainty that out of the greatness of his heart the son of the Deemster (of whom too many of them had been talking ill) had covered the nakedness of the poor stricken sinner who had sunk back in his surplice to a seat behind him.
When the service was over, and the clergy had returned to the vestry, the congregation remained standing until the Governor had left the church. But nobody looked at him now, for all eyes were on the two who followed him the Deemster and Victor.
The Deemster had taken his son’s arm as he stepped out of his pew, and as he walked down the aisle, through the lines of his people, his head was up and his eyes were shining.
“Did thou see that, Mistress?” said Robbie Creer, in triumphant tones to Janet Curphey, as she was stepping back, with a beaming face, into her carriage at the gate.
“Thou need have no fear of thy lad, I tell thee. The Ballamoar will out!”
But the day of temptation was coming, and too soon it came.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CALL OF BESSIE COLLISTER
IT was the first Saturday in August, when the throbbing and thunging of the vast machinery of the mills and factories of the English industrial counties comes to a temporary stop, and for three days at least, tens of thousands of its servers, male and female, pour into the island for health and holiday.
Stowell and Gell had never yet seen the inrushing of the liberated ones, so with no other thought, and little thinking what fierce game fate was playing with them, they had come into Douglas that day, in flannels and straw hats, in eager spirits and with high steps, to look on its sights and scenes.
It was late afternoon, and they made first for the pier, where a crowd of people had already assembled to witness the arrival of an incoming steamer.
She was densely crowded. Every inch of her deck seemed to be packed with passengers, chiefly young girls, as the young men thought, some of them handsome, many of them pretty, all of them comely. With sparkling eyes and laughing mouths they shouted their salutations to their friends on the pier, while they untied the handkerchiefs which they had bound about their heads to keep down their hair in the breeze on the sea, and phoned on their hats before landing.
The young men found the scene delightful. A little crude, perhaps a little common, even a little coarse, but still delightful.
Then they walked along the promenade, and that, too, was crowded. From the water’s edge to the round hill-tops at the back of the town, every thoroughfare seemed to be thrilling with joyous activity. Hackney carriages, piled high with luggage and higher still with passengers, were sweeping round the curve of the bay; windows and doors were open and filled with faces, and the whole sea-front, from end to end, seemed to be as full of women’s eyes as a midnight sky of stars.
For tea they went up to Castle Mona a grave-looking mansion in the middle of the bay, built for a royal residence by one of the Earls of Derby when they were lords of Man before the Athols, but now declined to the condition of an hotel for English visitors, with its wooded slopes to the sea (wherein more than one of our old Manx Kings may have pondered the problems of his island kingdom), transformed into a public tea-garden, on which pretty women were sitting under coloured sunshades and a string band from London was playing the latest airs from Paris.
The young men took a table at the seaward end of the lawn, with the rowing boats skimming the fringe of the water in front, the white yachts scudding across the breast of the bay, the brown-sailed luggers dropping out of the harbour with the first flood of the flowing tide; and then the human tide of joyous life running fast on the promenade below girls chiefly, as they thought, usually in white frocks, white stockings and white shoes, skipping along like human daisy-chains with their arms entwined about each other’s waists, and sometimes turning their heads over their shoulders to look up at them and laugh.
The sun went down behind the hills at the back of the town, the string band stopped, the coloured sunshades disappeared, the gong was sounded from the hall of the hotel and they went indoors for dinner.
They sat by an open window of the stately dining-room (wherein our old Earls and their Countesses once kept court), and being in higher spirits than ever by this time, they ate of every dish that was put before them, drank a bottle of champagne, toasted each other and every pretty woman they could remember of the many they had seen that day (.” Here’s to that fine girl with the black eyes who was standing by the funnel “), and looked at intervals at the scenes outside until the light failed and the darkness claimed them.
At one moment they saw the dark hull of another steamer, lit up in every port-hole, gliding towards the pier, and at the next (or what seemed like the next), shooting across the white sheet of light from the uncovered windows of their dining-room, a large blue landau, drawn by a pair of Irish bays, driven by a liveried coachman. Gell leapt up to look at it.
“Vic,” he cried, “I think that must be the Governor’s carriage.”
“It is,” said Stowell.
“And that’s the Governor himself inside of it.”
“No doubt.”
“And the lady sitting beside him is …. yes, no …. yes …. upon my soul I believe it was his daughter.”
“Impossible,” said Stowell, and, remembering what Janet had told him, he thought no more of the matter.
They returned to the lawn to smoke after dinner, and then the sky was dark and the stars had begun to appear; the tide was up but the sea was silent; the rowing-boats were lying on the shingle of the beach; the yachts were at anchor in the bay; the last of the fishing-boats, each with a lamp in its binnacle, were doubling the black brow of the head, and from the farthest rock of it the revolving light in the light-house was sweeping the darkness from the face of the town as with an illuminated fan. The young men were enraptured. It was wonderful! It was enchanting!
