Complete works of hall c.., p.576
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 576
Sitting at the desk, where his father had sat the night before, he took up the leather-bound book and read it from end to end not without a sense of looking into the sanctuary of another soul, where only God’s eyes should see.
It was a large volume, of some five hundred quarto pages, with “Isobel’s Diary” inscribed on its first page, and these words below:
“Inasmuch as I cannot believe that my beloved companion who has died to-day is lost to me even in this life, and being convinced that the divine purpose in leaving me behind is that I may care for and guard her child, I dedicate this book to the record of my sacred duty.”
Then followed, in the Deemster’s steady handwriting, a daily entry, sometimes only a phrase or a line, sometimes a page, but always about his son:
“This morning in the library, making my desk under your portrait his altar, Parson Cowley baptised your boy Janet Curphey standing godmother, and the Attorney his other sponsor. We called him Victor, so the last of your dear wishes has been fulfilled.”
Stowell looked up and around him. He was on the very spot of that scene of so many years ago. Then came records of his childhood, his childish talk, his childish rhymes, his childish ailments:
“Your boy contracted a cold yesterday, and fearing it might develop into bronchitis, I sat up most of the night that I might go into the nursery at intervals to mend the fire under the steam kettle, Janet being worn out and sleepy. Thank God his breathing is better this morning!”
Stowell felt as if he were choking. Then came the records of his school-days; his expulsion; the slack times before he set to work; the bright ones when he was a student-at-law; the dark ones when he was going headlong to the dogs. After these latter entries it would be:
“A son is a separate being, Isobel. I can only stand and wait.”
Or sometimes, as if for comfort, a line from one of the great books, not rarely the Bible:
“Thy way is in the sea, and thy path is the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.”
It was now the middle of the night. A dog was howling somewhere in the farm. Stowell paused and thought of the superstition about a howling dog and a dead body. When he resumed his reading he turned the pages with a trembling hand.
“It is six months since Victor returned to the island and he has only been here twice. I had hoped he would come to live with me at Ballamoar. But I must not complain. Nature looks forward, not backward. No son can love his father as the father loves the son. That is the law of life, Isobel, and we who are fathers must reconcile ourselves to it.”
Stowell felt his head reel and his eyes swim. If he had only known! If somebody had only told him!
The fire behind him had gone out by this time and he had begun to shiver. But he turned back to the book for the few remaining pages. And then came a shock. They were all about Fenella, and the Deemster’s hope that she and his son would marry.
“Never were two young people better matched to the outer eye, Isobel that splendid girl with her conquering loveliness or your son with his mother’s face. Her influence on him seems to be wonderful. She has only been a month back from London, but he is like a new man already.”
Overwhelmed with confusion Stowell tried to close the book, but he could not do so.
“A man looks for a woman who is a heroine, and a woman for a man who is a hero, and please God these two have found each other.”
Then came a glowing account of the trial at Castle Rushen, and then:
“So it’s all well at last, Isobel. Your son can do without me now. He needs his father no longer. With that fine woman by his side he will go up and up. They will marry and carry on the tradition of the Ballamoars. It is the dearest wish of my heart that they should do so.”
There was only one entry after that, and it ran:
“I am tired and my work is done. Now I can rejoin you, having waited so long. When I close my eyes to-night I shall see your face I know I shall. So Good-night, Isobel! Or should I say, Good-morning?”
The clock on the landing was striking three the most solemn hour of day and night, for it is the hour between. Stowell, with a heavy heart, the book in one hand and his candle in the other, was going to bed. Reaching the door of his father’s room he dropped to his knees.
“Forgive me! Forgive me! Forgive me!”
But after a while a light seemed to break on him. Where his father now was he would know that there was no help for it that he, too, must follow the line of honour.
“Yes,” he thought, rising and going on to his own room. “I must do the right, whatever it may cost me.”
IV
On the morning of the burial, Stowell received a letter from Bessie Collister:
“Dere Victor, “I am sorry to here from Alick about the death of the Deemster you must feel it verry much the loss of such a good kinde father everrybody is talking about him and saying he was the best gentleman that everr was thank you for the nice cloths Mrs. Quayle bought me. Alick is very kinde “Bessie.”
The poor, illiterate, inadequate, ill-spelt message made Stowell’s heart grow cold, and with a certain shame he read it by stealth and then smuggled it away.
The news of the Deemster’s death had fallen on the Manx people like a thunder-bolt. The one great man of Man had gone. It was almost as if the island had lost its soul.
No work was done on the day of the funeral. At ten o’clock in the morning the whole population seemed to be crossing the Curragh lanes to Ballamoar. By eleven the broad lawn was covered with a vast company of all classes, from the officials to the crofters. A long line of carriages, cars and stiff carts, lined the roads that surrounded the house.
The day had broken fair, with a kind of mild brightness, but out on that sandy headland the wind had risen and white wreaths of mist were floating over the land. It was late September and the leaves were falling rapidly.
Nobody entered the house. According to Manx custom all stood outside. At half-past eleven the front door was opened and the body was brought out, under a pall, and laid on four chairs in front of it. A moment later Victor Stowell came behind, bareheaded and very pale. A wide space was left for him by the bier. A creeper that covered the house was blood-red at his back.
Somebody started a hymn “Abide with me” and it was taken up by the vast company in front. The rooks swirled and screamed over the heads of the singers. The bald head of old Snaefell looked down through the trees.
Then the procession was formed. It took the grassy lane at the back by which the Deemster had always gone to church. Everybody walked, and six sets of bearers claimed the right “to carry the old man home.”
They sang two hymns on the way: “Lead, Kindly Light” and “Rock of Ages.” Between the verses the wind whistled through the gorse hedges on either side. Sometimes it raised the skirt of the pall and showed the bare oak beneath.
When they reached the cross roads in front of the church the bell began to toll. At that moment a white mist was driving across the church tower and almost obscuring it.
The Bishop of the island was at the gate, waiting for the procession, but Parson Cowley, pale and trembling, was also there, and he would have fought to the death for his right to bury the Deemster. “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” he began in his quavering voice, as the procession came up, and at the next moment the mists vanished. The little churchyard with its weather-beaten stones, seemed to look up at the wondering sky and out on the sightless sea. The bearers had to bend their knees as they passed through the low door.
Every seat in the body of the church was occupied, and great numbers had to remain outside. But Victor Stowell sat alone in the pew of the Ballamoars with the marble tablet on the wall behind him four hundred years of his family and he the last of them. During the reading of the Epistle the lashing and wailing of the wind outside almost drowned the Bishop’s voice.
The service ended with the singing of another hymn, “O God, our help in ages past.” Everybody knew the words, and they were taken up by the people outside:
“Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away.”
Thus far Victor Stowell had gone through everything in a kind of stupor. He was conscious that the island was there to do honour to her greatest son, but that was nothing to him now. When he same to himself he was standing by the open vault of the Stowells. A line of stones lay over the closed part of it, some of them old and worn and with the lettering almost obliterated. But a cross of white marble, which had been dislodged from its place, lay at his feet, and it bore the words:
“To the dear memory of Isabel, the beloved wife of Douglas Stowell, Deemster of this Isle.”
Victor’s throat was throbbing. He was losing (what no man can lose twice) his father and greatest friend, whose slightest word and wish should be as sacred to him as his soul.
He heard the words “dust to dust” and they were like the reverberation of eternity. Then came a dead void, after Parson Cowley’s voice had ceased, and it was just as if the pulse of the world had stopped.
And then, at that last moment as he stepped forward and looked down, and everybody fell back for him, and only the sea’s boom was audible as it beat on the cliffs below, somebody (he did not turn to look, for he knew who it was) coming up to his side, and putting her arm through his, said in a tremulous voice, “He is better there. In their death they are not divided.”
It was Fenella.
At the next moment, something he could not resist, something unconquerable and overwhelming, made him put his arms about her and kiss her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SAVING OF KATE KINKADE
The Governor was waiting for Stowell at the side gate to Ballamoar.
“You look ill, my boy, and no wonder,” he said. “Fenella and I are to take a short cruise in the yacht before the autumn ends. You must come along with us.”
For the farmers and fishermen who had travelled long distances a meal had been provided in the barn a kind of robustious afterwake for the Deemster, presided over by the elder and younger Robbie Creers.
Alick Gell alone returned with Stowell to the house. In his black frock coat and tall silk hat he had walked back from the Church by Stowell’s side, snuffling audibly but saying nothing. To Stowell’s relief he was still silent through luncheon and for several hours afterwards. It was not until they were in the porch, and Gell was on the point of going, that anything of consequence was said.
“What about Bessie?” asked Stowell.
“Oh, Bessie?” said Gell (he looked a little confused) “Bessie’s all right, I think. But there’s trouble coming in that quarter, I’m afraid.”
“What trouble?”
“As we were walking along Langness yesterday I went down to tell her about the Deemster we met Caesar Qualtrough coming from the farm.”
“Qualtrough?”
“You know father of the young scoundrel who got us into that scrape at King William’s.”
“I remember.”
“He’s a friend of Dan Baldromma’s, and Dan is a tenant of my father’s and.... But good Lord, what matter! I’ve worse things than that to worry about.”
As Gell was going out of the gate, the night was falling and the stars were out, and he was saying to himself, “Does he really care for the girl, or is it only a sense of duty?”
And Stowell, as he closed the door and went back into the house (empty and vault-like now, as a house is on the first night after the being who has been the soul of it has been left outside) was thinking, “I can’t allow Alick to be my scapegoat any longer.”
But at the next moment he was thinking of Fenella. With mingled shame and joy he was asking himself what was being thought of the incident in the churchyard by Fenella herself, by the Governor, by everybody.
Next day the Attorney- General came with the will. Except for a few legacies to servants, the Deemster had left everything to his son.
“So, with your mother’s fortune, you are one of the rich men of the island, now, Victor. A great responsibility, my boy! I pray God you may choose the right partner. But” (with a meaning smile) “that will be all right, I think.”
During the next days Stowell occupied himself with Joshua Scarff, the Deemster’s clerk (a tall, thin, elderly man wearing dark spectacles) in paying-off the legacies. Only one of these gave him any anxiety. This was Janet’s, and it was accompanied by a pension, in case Victor should decide to superannuate her. Against doing so all his heart cried out, but something whispered that if Janet were gone it might be the easier for Bessie.
Janet was in floods of tears at the possibility.
“I couldn’t have believed it of the Deemster!” she said. “I really couldn’t! You can keep the legacy, dear. I have no use for it except to give it back to you. But I won’t leave Ballamoar. ‘Deed, I won’t! Not until another woman comes to be mistress in it, and wants me to go. And she never will, the darling I’ll trust her for that, anyway.”
A day or two later Stowell was in his father’s room, when he came upon an envelope inscribed: “To be opened by my son.” It contained a ring, a beautiful and valuable gem, with a note saying:
“This teas your mother’s engagement ring. I wish you to give it to Fenella Stanley. Take it yourself.”
Stowell was stupefied. Struggling with a sense of his duty to the girl whom he had sent to Derby Haven he had been telling himself that he must never see Fenella again. But here was a sacred command from the dead.
For three days he thought he could not possibly go to Government House. On the fourth day he went.
The beauty and charm of the atmosphere of Fenella’s home were heart-breaking. And Fenella herself, in a soft tea-gown, was almost more than he could bear to look upon.
She, too, seemed embarrassed, and when Miss Green (an English counterpart of Janet) left them alone with each other, and he gave her the ring, saying what his father had told him to do with it, her embarrassment increased.
She held it in her ringers, turned it over and looked at it, and said, “How lovely! How good of him!” And then, trembling and tingling, and with a slightly heightened colour, she looked at Stowell.
Suddenly a thought flashed upon him. Why had his father told him to take the ring to her himself? The answer was speaking in Fenella’s eyes that, at the topmost moment of their love, he should put it on.
At the next instant the Governor entered the drawing-room, and Fenella, holding up her hand (she had put the ring on for herself by this time) cried:
“See what the Deemster has left to me!”
“Beautiful!” said the Governor, and then he looked from Stowell to his daughter.
Stowell rose to go. He had the sense of flying from the house.
Fenella must have thought him a fool. The Governor must have thought him a fool. But better be a fool than a traitor!
A week passed and then an idea came to him. He would tell the truth to Bessie’s people the whole truth if necessary. That would commit him once for all to the line of honour. Having taken that public plunge there could be no looking back, and the bitter struggle between his passion and his duty would then be over.
With a certain pride at the thought of being about to do an heroic thing he set out one day for Ramsey, intending to return by Baldromma. But on entering his outer office his young clerk told him that Mr. Daniel Collister was in his private room, that he had been waiting there for two hours, and refusing to go away.
Dan, with his short, gross figure, was standing astride on the hearthrug, and without so much as a bow he plunged into his business.
A respectable man’s house was in disgrace. His step-daughter had run away. Been carried off by a scoundrel there couldn’t be a doubt of it. A month gone and not the whisper of a word from her. The mother was broken-hearted, so he had been traipsing the island over to find the girl.
“I belave I’m on the track of her at last though. She’s down Castletown way, and the man that’s been the cause of her trouble isn’t far off, I’m thinking.”
“And whom do you say it is, Mr. Collister?”
“Somebody that’s middling close to yourself, sir Mr. Alick Gell, the son of the Spaker.”
“No, no, no!”
“Who else then?”
Stowell tried to speak but could not.
“Wasn’t he the cause of her disgrace at the High Bailiff’s? And hasn’t he been keeping up his bad character ever since standing by the side of disorderly walkers in the Douglas Coorts, they’re saying?”
He must have promised to marry the girl. But he hadn’t. He (Dan) had been to the Registrar’s at Douglas and found that out.
“The toot! The boght! The booby! I was warning her enough. The man that takes advantage of a dacent girl isn’t much for marrying her afterwards.”
Remembering Dan’s share in the catastrophe, Stowell was feeling the vertigo of a temptation to take the gross creature by the neck and fling him through the window.
“Why do you come to me?” he asked.
“To ask you to tell your friend that he’s got to make an honest woman of the girl.”
“Is that all you are thinking about?”
Dan drew a quick breath, then dug both hands into the upright pockets of his trousers, thrust forward his thick neck, with a gesture peculiar to the bull, and answered:
“No, I’m thinking of myself as well, and what for shouldn’t I? I’m going to stand up for nay own rights, too. The man that treats my girl like that has got to marry her, and I’m not going to be satisfied with nothing less.”
Then picking up his billycock hat and making for the door he said:
“I lave it with you, Mr. Stowell, Sir. If the Dempster was the grand gentleman people are saying, his son will be seeing justice done to me and mine. If not, the island will be too hot for the guilty man, I’m thinking.”
When Dan had gone Stowell felt sick and dizzy, and as if he were drawing back from the edge of a precipice. His heroic act of self-sacrifice had dwindled to a ridiculous weakness.
