Complete works of hall c.., p.571
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 571
The evening was now at its zenith, and the orchestra was tuning up for the” shadow-dance.” The white lights on the walls went out, and over the arc lamps in the glass roof a number of coloured disks were passed, to throw shadows over the dancers, as of the sunrise, the sunset, the moon and the night with its stars. The dance itself was of a nondescript kind in which at intervals, the man, with a whoop, lifted his partner off her feet and swung her round him in his arms a sort of symbol of marriage by capture.
When the shadow-dance ended there was much hand-clapping among the dancers. It had to be repeated, this tune with a more rapid movement and to the accompaniment of a song, which, being sung by the men in chorus, made the hall throb like the inside of a drum. Many of the dancers fell out exhausted, but Victor and Bessie kept up to the last.
Then the big side doors were thrown open, and amid a babel of noise, cries and laughter, nearly all the dancers trooped out of the hall into the garden to cool. Victor gave his arm to Bessie and they went out also.
Lights gleamed here and there in the darkness of the trees, throwing shadows full of mystery and charm. After a while the orchestra within was heard beginning again, and most of the dancers hastened back to the hall but Victor said, “Let us stay out a little longer.”
Bessie agreed and foe some minutes more they wandered through the garden, in and out of the electric light, with the low murmur of the sea coming to them from the shore and the muffled music from the hall.
She was breathing deeply, and he was feeling a little dizzy. They found themselves talking in whispers, both in the Anglo -Manx, and then laughing nervously.
“Did you raelly, raelly see the young colts racing on the tops, though?”
“‘Deed no, not I, woman. But I belave in my heart I know who did.”
“Who?”
“Why, you!”
At that word, and the touch of his hand about her waist, she made a nervous laugh, and turned to him, her eyes closed, her lips parted and her white teeth showing, and they drew together in a long kiss.
At the next moment a clock struck coldly through the still air from the tower of a neighbouring church and Bessie broke away.
“Gracious me, that must be ten o’clock. I have to catch the ten train home.”
“You can’t now. It’s impossible,” he said, and he tried to hold her.
“I must I promised,” she cried, and she bounded off. He called and followed a few steps, but she was gone.
Feeling like a torn wound he returned to the dancing-hall. The scene was the same as before but it seemed crude and tame and even dead to him now. Where was Gell? He must have gone to see the fair girl off by the ten train. He would come back presently.
Victor returned to the hotel. To compose his nerves while he waited he called for another half bottle of wine, and drank it, iced. The music was still murmuring in his ears. After a while it stopped; there were a few bars of the National Anthem, and then the pattering like rain of innumerable feet on the paved way from the dancing-hall to the promenade. It was now a few minutes to eleven, and remembering that that was the hour of the last train to the north he walked up to the station.
A noisy throng was on the platform, chiefly young Manx farming people of both sexes, returning to their homes in the country. The open third-class carriages were full of them, all talking and laughing together.
Victor walked down the line of the train and looked into each of the dim-lit carriages for Bessie, thinking it impossible that she could have caught the earlier one. Not finding her, he inquired if the ten train had left promptly and was told it had been half-an-hour late. She must have gone.
He got into an empty first-class compartment, folded his arms and closed his eyes and the train started. While it ran into the dark country*the farming people, being unable to talk with comfort, sang. Over the rolling of the wheels their singing came in a dull roar, and when the train stopped at the wayside stations it went up in the sudden silence in a wild discord of male and female voices.
Victor was beginning to feel cold. He put up the window. His brain which had been blurred was becoming lucid. He recalled the scenes he had taken part in and some of them seemed to him now to have been crude and common and even a little vulgar. He thought of Bessie and felt ashamed.
When the train drew up at the station for the glen he turned his face from the direction of the mill, and to defeat a desire to look at it he opened the window at the other side of the carriage and put out his head.
The free air was refreshing to body and brain, but when his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness he saw the broad belt of the trees of Ballamoar. That brought a stabbing memory of Janet and the promise he bad given her, and then of the Deemster and his conversation with the Governor.
He began to shiver, and to feel as if he were awakening from a fit of moral intoxication. To-morrow he would go home, and since he could not trust himself any longer, he would put himself out of the reach of temptation by living at Ballamoar in future.
When the tram drew up at Ramsey it was half-past twelve. As he walked out of the quiet station into the echoing streets of the sleeping town he was drawing a deep breath and saying to himself:
“Thank God!”
It was all over.
CHAPTER NINE
THE MASTER OF MAN
DAN BALDROMMA’S meeting in the market-place had not been the success he had expected. Standing on the steps of the town lamp, between the Saddle Inn and the Ship Store, he had discoursed on the rights of the labourer to the land he cultivated.
The Earth was the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof. Therefore it could not belong to the big ones who were adding field to field least of all to their wastrels of sons who were doing nothing but hang about the roads and the glens to ruin the daughters of decent men. The moral of this was that the land belonged to the people and the time was coming when they would pay no rent for it.
Dan’s audience of Manx farmers had listened to this new gospel with Manx stolidity, but a group of young English visitors, clerks from the cotton factories, looking down from the balcony of the Saddle Inn, had received it with open derision.
Dan had ignored their opposition as long as possible, merely saying, when his audience laughed at their sallies, “We must make allowance for some ones, comrades children still, they’ve not been rocked enough.”
But when at length they had called him Bradlaugh Junior and Ingersoll the Second and told him to keep his tongue off better men, Dan had looked up at- the balcony and cried, “If you’re calling me by them honoured names I’m taking my hat off to you” (suiting the action to the word),” but if you’re saying you are better men we’ll be going into a back coort some-wheres and taking off our jackets and westcots.”
To preserve the peace the police had had to put an end to the meeting, whereupon Dan, spitting contemptuously and snorting about “The Cottonies” and “the Cotton balls,” had harnessed his horse at the Plough Inn and driven home in a dull rage.
It had been ten o’clock when he got back to Baldromma, and after unharnessing his horse in his undrained stable, and wiping his best boots with a wisp of straw, he had stepped round to the kitchen.
His wife was there, beating time on the hearthstone to a long-drawn Methodist hymn while she stirred the porridge in a pot that hung over a slow peat fire.
“Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and His love.”
“Your daughter isn’t back then?” said Dan with a growl.
“Be raisonable, man,” said Mrs. Collister.” Eleven o’clock thou said, and it’s only a piece after ten yet.”
She poured out the porridge and hobbled to the dairy for a basin of milk, and then Dan, after a sour silence, sat down to his supper.
“They were telling me in Ramsey,” he said, making noises with his spoon,” that the Spaker’s son went up to Douglas to-day.”
“Like enough!” salt-Mrs. Collister.
“I’ll go bail your girl went up to meet him.”
“Sakes alive, man veen, what for should thou be Baying that?”
“She’s fit enough for it anyway.”
“But what has the girl done? Twenty-four years for Spring and not a man at her yet.”
“Chut! Once they cut the cables that sort is the worst that’s going. She’d be an angel itself though to stand up against a waistrel like yander.”
“Bessie will be home for eleven,” said Mrs. Collister.
“She’d better, or she’ll find Dan Baldromma a man of his word, ma’am.”
After that there was another sour silence in which both watched the open-faced clock whose pendulum swung by the wall. Tick, tick tick, said the clock. To the man it was going slowly, to the woman it seemed to fly. But hardly had the fingers pointed to eleven, or the chain begun to shake for the first stroke of the hour, when Dan was at the door, bolting and locking it.
“Will thou not give the girl a few minutes’ grace, even?”
“Not half a minute.”
“But the ten train hasn’t whistled at the bridge yet.”
“I’ve nothing to do with trains, Misthress Collister. Eleven o’clock, I said, and now it’s eleven and better.”
“But surely thou’ll never shut thy door on a poor girl in the middle of the night?”
“There’s others that’s open to her she said so herself, remember. She’s not for coming home to-night, so take your candle and get to bed, woman.”
“But the train must be late I’ll wait up myself for her.”
“You might burn your candle to the snuff she’s not for coming, I tell you.”
“But she promised me faithfully promised me....”
“Get to bed, ma’am. I wonder you’re not thinking shame, making excuses for the bad doings of your by-child, and you a Methodist.”
The woman was on the verge of tears.
“Shame enough it is, Dan Collister, when a mother has to shut her heart to her own child if she’s not to show disrespect to her husband.”
In the intimacy of the bedroom Dan threw off all disguise. Winding his silver-lever watch and hanging it with its Albert on a hook in the bed-post, and then sitting on the side of the bed to undress he almost crowed over his prospects. That son of the Speaker would have to pay for his whistle this time! Baldromma would be his by heirship, and a father had a right to damages for the loss of the services of his daughter.
“There’ll be no more rent going paying by me, I’m thinking,” said Dan.
So that was his scheme! Mrs. Collister stood long in her cotton nightdress, fumbling with the strings of her night-cap, and wondering if she could ever lie down with the man again.
“Are you never for putting out that candle and coming to bed, woman?”
Half-an-hour passed and the mother lay still and listened. Dan was asleep by this time and breathing audibly, but there was no sound outside save the slipping of the water from the fixed wheel and the stamping of the horse in the stable. At last came the whistling of the train, and a few minutes later, Bessie’s step on the” street” and then the rattling of the latch of the kitchen door.
Mrs. Collister tried to slip out of bed without awakening Dan, but her sciatica had made her limbs stiff and she knocked over the candlestick that stood on a chair beside her. This awakened her husband, and hearing the noise downstairs, he rolled out of bed, saying, in a threatening voice, “Lie thou there I’ll settle her.”
He went out to the stairhead, slamming the bedroom door behind him, threw up the sash of a window on the landing, and shouted into the darkness:
“Who’s there?”
“Me, of course,” cried Bessie.
A fierce altercation followed, in which Dap’s voice was harsh and coarse, and Bessie’s shrill with anger.
“Then find your bed where you’ve found your company,” shouted Dan. And shutting down the window with a crash he returned to the bedroom.
The mother heard Bessie going off, and the fading sound of the girl’s footsteps tore her terribly. But after a few minutes more Dan was making noise in his nostrils again and she got up and crept downstairs to the kitchen (where the dull red of the dying turf left just enough light to see by), slid the bolts back noiselessly, opened the door and called in a whisper:
“Bessie!”
No answer came back to her, so she stepped out to the end of the cobbled way, barefooted and in her nightdress and nightcap, and called again:
“Bessie! Bessie!”
Still there was no reply; so she returned to the kitchen, leaving the door on the latch, and sat for a long hour hi a rocking chair by the hearth (souvenir of the days when Bessie was a child, and she had rocked her to sleep in it), fighting, in the misery of her heart, with the black thought which Dan had put there.
At length she remembered Susie and persuaded herself that Bessie must have gone to the Ginger Hall to sleep.
“Yes, Bessie must have gone to Susie.”
Being comforted by this thought, and feeling cold, for the fire had gone out, she crept upstairs. It was hard to go by Bessie’s room on the landing. Every night for years she had stopped there on her way to bed. And in the winter, when the wind in the trees in the glen made a roar like the sea, she had called through the closed door:” Art thou warm enough, Bessie, or will I bring thee my flannel petticoat?” And now the door was open and the room was empty!
Dan was still asleep when she got back to the bedroom and her approach did not awaken him, so she fumbled her way to the bed (knowing where she was when her feet touched the warm sheepskin that lay by the side of it) and then opened the clothes and crept in.
The cold air she brought with her awakened Dan, and he turned on the pillow and said, “You’ve not been letting in that girl of yours, have you?”
“No!”
Dan made a grunt of satisfaction, and then said, with his face to the wall, “Remember, you’ll have to be up early to milk for yourself in the morning.”
“Yes.”
Then came a yawn, and then a snore, and then silence fell on the little house.
II
Bessie had run all the way to the station and then found that the train had nearly half-an-hour to wait for the passengers by the last of the day’s steamers. The carriages were full of English visitors, but there were very few Manx people and she could not see Susie anywhere. This vexed her with the thought of having to tear herself away a good hour earlier than anybody else. It was all her mother’s fault getting her to make that ridiculous promise.
From such thoughts, as the train ran into the country, her mind swung back to the memory of Stowell. She recalled his looks, his smile, his whole person and every word he had said to her down to the moment of that burning kiss.
What pleased her most was the certainty that he had never kissed a girl before. The trembling of his lips, when they were lip to lip, told her that. And in spite of all that had been said of him she was sure he had never had a woman in his arms until to-night never!
And she? Well, she had never before been kissed by a man. Alick. Gell? She was only a child then. Kiss-in-the-ring at Michael Fair? Chut! A girl felt that no more than the wind blowing over her bare cheek.
By the clocks at the wayside stations she saw she was going to be late getting home, but she didn’t care. Dan Baldromma wasn’t fool enough to shut her out. But let him if he liked to! Where would he go to get another girl to work for her wages summer and winter, as if the creatures had been her own, up all hours calving, and out before the dawn in the lambing season, when the hoar-frost was on the fields?
It was twenty minutes past eleven when she got down at the glen station, and there was Susie getting down also! Susie was in the sulks. Not only had Bessie deliberately lost her in the dancing-hall, but after she had hurried away to catch the ten train, knowing Bessie had promised to return by it, she had had to come back alone!
This added to Bessie’s vexation, and when she reached the house, and found the door locked on her, it expressed itself in her hand when she rattled the kitchen latch.
Then came the scene with Dan Baldromma who shouted down at her from the upper window as if she had been a thief it was suffocating! And when he said,” Find your bed where you’ve found your company,” and banged down the sash on her, she flung away, crying, as well as she could for the anger that was choking her, “So I will, and you’ll be sorry for it some day.”
At that moment she meant to sleep with Susie at the Ginger Hall Inn, and offer herself next day to one or other of the farmers who had so often asked for her. But she had not gone many steps before she reflected that all the farmers’ houses would be full now and nobody could take her in until Michaelmas.
No matter! She might have been no better off. Those old farmers were all the same. If it wasn’t the bullying of brutes like Dan Baldromma it was the meanness of old hypocrites like Teare of Lezayre, who laid foundation stones, and put purses of money on top of them, and then went home and gave his girls cold potatoes and salt herrings for supper!
That made her think of young Willie Teare. She had met him in Ramsey the day before, when he had said he was tired of slaving for his father, and meant to set up in a farm for himself as soon as he could find the right wife. But no thank you, no marrying with a farmer for her! After a woman had worn herself to the bone, keeping things together and gathering the stock, and she was doubled up with sciatica, and ought to be in bed, with somebody to wait on her, the husband was nagging and ragging her from morning to night. That was marriage! Hadn’t she seen enough of it?
Bessie had reached the Ginger Hall by this time, and, seeing a light in Susie’s window, she was about to call up when (with Dan’s insult ‘Find your bed, etc.’ still rankling in her mind) a startling thought seized her and made her heart leap and the hot blood to rush through and through her. There was one way to escape from Dan Baldromma and his tyrannies – Mr. Stowell!
Mr. Stowell would return by the last train to Ramsey, having bachelor rooms there, in which he lived alone so people were saying. If she were to meet him on his arrival and tell him what had happened he would find some way out for her. Of course he would! She was sure he would!
