Complete works of hall c.., p.612
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 612
When the time came for the Judges to enter the court-house the atmosphere was rank with evil passions and the acid odour of perspiring people.
Taubman was the Deemster. Although tortured by rheumatism he had dragged himself out of bed, having scented an opportunity of gaining favour with the Governor.
The Governor presided, as it was his duty to do, but it was remarked that except for one moment on taking his seat, when he looked round at the open-mouthed spectators with an expression which seemed to say,” What a race!” he never raised his eyes.
It was a short trial, and rarely had there been a more irregular one. Taubman was notorious for his legal deficiencies. In earlier days Stowell, in one of his “Limericks,” had christened him “Old Necessity,” because “necessity knew no law.” He had long been jealous of Stowell’s popularity and particularly of his rapid rise to a position which he had had to wait forty years for. Now he had the” upstart” in his hand at last.
When the case was called Stowell was brought up by two police-men and placed in the dock. His cheeks were very pale and his eyes heavy as with unshed tears. It was almost as if his youth had stepped with one stride into age. But suffering gives a certain sublimity, and it was said afterwards that never before had he looked so strong and noble.
The spectators saw nothing of that now. His calm seemed to them to be callousness. He did not appear to see the scorching glances they cast at him. The last time they had seen him in Court he was on the bench, now he was in the dock, and they would have been better pleased if, in the dread certainty of his fate, he had betrayed the fellness of terror. But except for one moment, when he turned slowly round to look at them, and their murmurs ceased suddenly at full sight of his face, he seemed to them to have forgotten the shame of the place he stood in.
Taubman, in a rasping voice, read out the charge to the prisoner and called on him to plead.
“How say you, are you Guilty or Not Guilty?”
“Guilty,” said Stowell in a clear voice, and then, after a moment of merciless silence, there was a deep drawing of breath.
“Had you any accomplices?”
“None.”
“Humph! And what was your motive in committing this crime?”
Again there was a’ moment of merciless silence, and then Stowell, speaking very slowly, said, “I had seduced the prisoner and was therefore the first cause of her crime.”
Ah! There was another long indrawing of breath among the spectators. It was a wonder the man didn’t fall dead with shame!
“And what, if you please, was your reason for making this confession?”
“I could not allow an innocent person to suffer for my crime.”
“Was that your only reason?”
The silence became breathless. After a pause Stowell said, in a low voice, “That is a question I will answer to a higher tribunal.”
“Indeed!” said Taubman, with a sneer, and then the silence was broken by a cowardly titter which passed through the court-house.
The Attorney-General rose to summarise the facts. His face was white and decomposed; his thin hair was disordered, and the linen slip under his chin was awry.
Only once before since leaving Government House had he been out of doors to visit Stowell at the police-station and receive the letter which had been found on him. He, too, had dragged himself from bed to come to Court, being afraid to leave the prosecution of the son of his old friend, the boy brought up in his own office, to the Deputy whom the Governor was sure to appoint in his place Hudgeon, who sat by his side.
His speech did not please either the Court or the spectators. It gave the impression of being a plea for the prisoner. And indeed there were moments when the Attorney seemed to forget that he was there to prosecute.
Speaking in a tremulous voice, and never once looking towards the dock, he said it would seem incredible that anyone in the position of the accused could be guilty of the crime with which he was charged. But the lucidity of his confession, and its correspondence to the facts as they knew them, made it inconceivable that he had told a lie. There could be no doubt he was guilty, and being so he came under the condemnation of the law.
“Ha!”
“But,” said the old man, flashing his moist eyes on the glistening eyes behind him, “the Crown stands for Justice, not revenge.”
The Court would remember that the prisoner had made a voluntary confession, that nothing would have been known of his crime if he had not of himself disclosed it, and before the sublime spectacle of a man who was making the only reparation in his power to the Justice he had sullied, it would be touched by the fire of a great renunciation.
A murmur of dissent passed through the court-house.
Again, the Court would remember that the prisoner had confessed to the secret sin which had tempted him to his crime. If he had been a scoundrel he could have concealed it, but he had put conscience before liberty, before reputation, perhaps before life.
“Oh!”
Once more the Court would remember that the prisoner had surrendered to Justice because another was in danger of arrest, and it would not be human if it were not moved by the sight of a man giving himself up to the law so that an innocent man might not suffer in his stead.
Finally, the Court would remember the youth of the prisoner, his undoubted talents, his brilliant promise, his high position, and the revered memory of his father, and if, moved by these considerations, it decided to impose a nominal penalty, the Crown would be satisfied.
“Ah!”
“But whatever the punishment the Court thinks fit to impose on the prisoner,” said the Attorney, “it can be as nothing to that which he has inflicted upon himself. Never in this island has there been so great a downfall, and rarely can suffering for sin have been more terrible since the Veil of the Temple was rent in twain and darkness covered the land.”
It was impossible for the spectators not to be hushed to awe by the daring words and quivering tones with which the old Attorney closed his speech, but Taubman, in the ferocity of his malice, was unmoved.
“Humph!” he said. “All that means, I suppose, that a man may be innocent and guilty at the same time.”
And then another cowardly titter ran through the court-house.
The time had come for judgment. Taubman leaned over the bench, clasped his bony fingers in front of him, and said, “Victor Stowell, stand up.”
Stowell rose, and stood with his hands interlaced, and his heavy eyes fixed steadfastly on his Judge.
“Have you anything to say why judgment should not be pronounced upon you?”
“Nothing.”
It needs no skill to wound the defenceless, and for the next few minutes Taubman seemed to glory in the exercise of his power.
“Prisoner at the bar,” he said, “you have confessed to the crime of breaking prison to effect the escape from custody of a young woman whom you had first debauched and then abandoned.”
“Ha!”
“It has been said on your behalf (strangely enough by the public servant whose duty it was to arraign you) that your confession was voluntary. Nothing of the kind. It was made when the hand of the law was upon you, when the warrant for the arrest of an innocent man was about to be issued, and you were face to face with the certainty of exposure and punishment.”
“Ha!”
“It has also been said that the confession of your private sin shows the operation of your conscience. But your conscience would have been better employed when you sat in judgment on your own victim a deliberate offence that is probably without precedent in the history of criminal jurisprudence.
“Finally it has been argued that your high position and family connections ought to mitigate your punishment. On the contrary, they ought to increase it, as showing your disregard of your responsibilities, and especially your ingratitude to the head of the judiciary, his Excellency” (here Taubman bowed to the Governor), “whose favours you have so ill requited.”
“Ah!”
“Your crime is clear. It is without a particle of justification. You have disgraced your name, your profession, and your island. Therefore the Court can only mark its sense of the enormity of your offence by inflicting the maximum penalty prescribed by the law two years’ imprisonment in Castle Rushen.”
Hardly had the last words been spoken when the spectators broke into frenzied shouts of approval. Neither the police nor the Judge made any attempt to repress them. The Governor rose hastily and hurried off the bench, and Taubman, gathering up his papers, his spectacles and his two walking-sticks, hobbled after him.
The shouting went on. It surged about Stowell as he stepped out of the dock and passed with slow stride through the door that led down to the prison. The deadened sound of it followed him while he descended the stairs, and when he reached the cell it mingled with yet wilder shouting from the streets, where a tumultuous crowd had been waiting for the verdict. The delight of the mob seemed delirious. Some women from the meaner streets by the quay were dancing on the pavement.
Meantime, in his robing-room with the Governor, Taubman was congratulating himself on his travesty of Justice. Taking his wig off his stubbly grey hair he said, “I think I gave my gentleman his deserts for his bad treatment of your Excellency. Eh? What?”
And then the Governor spoke for the first time that day.
“Maybe so,” he said, “but all the same you are not fit to wipe his boots, Sir.”
II
Early next morning Stowell was removed to Castle Rushen.
There was a rumour (probably inspired by the police) that he would travel by the seven o’clock train, therefore at half-past six the railway station and its approaches were full of a noisy crowd. But at ten minutes to seven the prison van, drawn by two horses, drew up at the back door under the court-house and Stowell was hustled into it.
“Come, get in, quick,” said the Chief Constable (all his former deference gone), and then the van rolled away, Stowell being shut up in the windowless compartment within, while the Chief Constable and his Inspector of Police occupied the outer one with the grill.
Crossing a swing-bridge which spanned the top of the harbour, they climbed the lane to the Head until they reached the cliff road, and had the town behind them under a veil of morning mist, and the open sea in front. There had been wind overnight, and a fiery sun was blazing out of a fierce sky like the red light from the open door of a furnace.
Stowell, in his dark compartment, had not yet asked himself which way he was going. The feeling of exaltation, of doing a divinely appointed duty, which had buoyed him up during the trial, was now gone. The nullity of his past life, the hopelessness of the future had left him with the sense of being already a dead man. Two years inside the blind walls of Castle Rushen, while the sun shone and the flowers grew and the birds sang outside, and the world went on without him how could he live through it?
At length, having a sense of physical as well as spiritual suffocation, he tapped timidly at his door, and asked, when it was opened, if it might remain so for a few moments that he might have a breath of air.
“Certainly not,” said the Chief Constable, and he clashed the door back.
“Better so,” thought Stowell.
He had caught a glimpse of the scene outside, and knew where they were on the rocky shelf along which he had driven with Fenella after the oath-taking at Castletown.
The memory of that day came back to him like a stab. He could feel Fenella’ s warm presence by his side; he could see her gleaming eyes; he could hear her rich contralto voice as they sang together above the boom of the sea below and the cry of the sea-fowl over- head:
“Love is the Queen for you and for me, Salve, Salve Regina!”
What memories! What regrets! Only now did he know how necessary Fenella had been to him only now when he had lost her. He felt like a dead man dead, yet doomed to remember his former existence.
An hour and a half passed. Stowell sat huddled up in the close atmosphere of the van, with the thunderous rumble of the roof above him and the crack of the driver’s whip outside. He knew every mile of the way. When the van swung round at a turn of the road, or the horses slowed down at the foot of a hill, the memory of some moment in his drive with Fenella came back to him, and he told himself how far they had still to go.
At length they were entering Castletown. He knew that by the hollow sound under the horses’ hoofs as they crossed the bridge over the harbour the bridge from which Fenella had looked back and waved her hand to the crowd about the Castle gate who had raised the deafening shout” Long live the new Deemster, hip, hip, hip!”
Groaning audibly, digging with his fingernails deep trenches in his palms, praying for strength of spirit, he waited for the ordeal which he felt was before him.
Another crowd had gathered about the Castle gate that morning.
Telegrams had been received from Douglas saying that Stowell was travelling by road, so half the people of Castletown had come down to the quay as to a funeral to see the last of the condemned man before he was buried in his living tomb.
They were of two classes. The larger and noisier class consisted of raw youths and young men to whom the trial of the Deemster had been mainly a subject for lewd jests about Bessie Collister.
One of them, with the small eyes of a sow and the thick lips of a cod, wore a butcher’s apron and a steel attached to a belt about his waist. This was John Qualtrough (son of Caesar), the lusty ruffian whose skull had been cracked in his boyhood by the blow from the stick which had been intended for Alick Gell.
The Castle walls were low by the gate, and off the shoulders of a comrade Qualtrough clambered to a seat on the battlements. From that elevation he beguiled the time of waiting by conducting a chorus of his companions on the ground, using his steel for baton. He selected the crudest of the old Manx ditties, and amid shrieks of laughter, he emphasised the doubtful lines by frequent repetition.
“I’m not engaged to any young man I solemnly do swear, For I mane to be a vargin and still the laurels wear. For I mane to be a vargin and still the laurels wear.”
The other class, consisting chiefly of women, demure and severe, occupied themselves with serious talk about Fenella. That splendid young woman! It was shocking the way Stowell had treated her worse than the other in a manner of speaking.
“They’re telling me she wasn’t at the trial in Douglas yesterday.”
“What wonder if she wasn’t, poor thing! I wouldn’t trust but she’ll never show her face in public again.”
“It’s no use talking, the man has brought shame on the lot of us and is a disgrace to the name of a Manxman.”
Suddenly, over the loud clamour there came a wild shout from the battlements.
“Here he is!”
The prison van was seen to cross the bridge, and as it came up to the gate, it was received with a howl of execration.
Stowell heard it. In his dark compartment the surging of the crowd around the outside of the van was like the breaking of a tidal wave on a sleeping town in the middle of the night. The van stopped with a sickening jolt, and he heard the Inspector of Police crying, “Stand back! Make way!”
Then there was a flash of daylight and the voice of the Chief Constable saying peremptorily, “Come, get out! Be quick about it.”
At the next moment he was on the ground with a roar of hoarse voices and a rush of contorted faces around him. There were screams of lewd laughter and yells of merciless derision. Arms were raised as if to strike him. He felt himself being pushed and pulled by the police through the open gate and up the passage way to the Portcullis The crowd, not yet appeased, tried to force their way past the jailer and his turnkeys as if to lynch him. But they were checked by an unexpected sight. A young woman, in the costume of a nurse, with heaving breast, quivering nostrils, and flaming eyes, gushed through the gate with outstretched arms to stop them.
They recognised -her instantly, but it was not that alone that cowed them. There is something in a brave act which pierces the noisiest crowd to the core of its cruel soul. Certainly this crowd fell back and its uproar died down.
Then in a voice which vibrated with contempt and scorn, Fenella tried to speak to them.
“You... you... you...” she began, but further words would not come, and returning to the Castle she clashed its iron-studded gate in the people’s faces.
The crowd broke up rapidly and slank away, subdued and ashamed.
“Morning, men!”
“Morning!”
Within two minutes nearly all were gone. The open space in front of the Castle gate was empty, save for two old women with little black shawls over their heads, who were wiping their eyes on their cotton aprons.
“Did thou see that, Bella?”
“‘Deed I did, though.”
“I belave in my heart it was the girl herself the one they say he has done so bad to.”
“Aw well, if a woman isn’t willing to stand up for her man whatever he has done what is she anyway?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE RESURRECTION OF A SOUL
THREE days later, Fenella set out for Bishop’s Court in a two-horse landau.
The island had begun to recover from its fit of moral intoxication. Sympathy was swinging round to Stowell. The pathos of his stupendous downfall had taken hold of the people. Taubman had been wrong. Nobody would have known anything of Stowell’s guilt if he had not revealed it himself. There must be something great in a man who could take up his cross like that. And as for that wonderful woman who might be living in Government House but was living in Castle Rushen instead... As Fenella, in her nurse’s costume, drove through the town some of the women curtsied to her, and most of the men raised their hats. She returned the salutations of none.
“So that’s how they expect to wipe out what they did to Victor! Not if I know it though!”
Two hours afterwards she was at the Bishop’s palace a somewhat palatial place, partly old, partly new, sleeping in the shelter of big trees and surrounded by a blaze of rhododendrons.
The Bishop, in his dapper black clothes, received her in a room in the old part of the house. It had been the study of the most famous of his predecessors, the fanatic and saint who had ordered that Kate Kinrade, for the saving of her soul, should be dragged at the tail of a boat. Souvenirs of the dead Bishop were on the walls and tables his portrait, his Bible, his short crozier, his tasselled staff, and his horn-rimmed spectacles.
