Complete works of hall c.., p.596
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 596
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 burst 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 … 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 (“ J 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 bare-backed 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 do 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.”
